


Another Vision of Us

by Laliandra



Series: Love Songs of the Criminally Unaware [1]
Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Big Bang Challenge, Con Artists, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-17
Updated: 2011-10-17
Packaged: 2017-10-24 17:27:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/266020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laliandra/pseuds/Laliandra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which there is a merry band of con-people called the F. Well, merry until the fucking Winklevii take their greatest asset, the facebook. As if that wasn’t bad enough, their only chance of getting it back requires bringing back their estranged team member. Eduardo Saverin (of the Miami Saverins) is a con-man extraordinaire, weather dork, sometime cat burglar and Mark’s ex best-friend (it totally counts if you only say that when they were unconscious).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Vision of Us

NOW

People used to underestimate them. Too young, wrong background, crazy ideas, nice faces. Well, people still regularly underestimate Chris but he never seems to mind, Mark supposes it makes it easier for him to charm them into doing exactly what he wants. Even Mark still falls for it, despite the fact that he knows - has video, monetary, and textual proof in fact- that underneath that innocent, trustworthy face lurks a mind like a steel trap.

The thing is, Mark did mind, right up until the moment that the douches were left sitting in the - sometimes literal - ashes of their former empires and cursing Mark’s name. Or cursing the F. Whatever. Things are different now and Mark _loves_ notoriety. Dustin and Chris may enjoy easy, unaware targets but Mark revels in the fact that everyone knows who the F are these days. They are among the richest, brightest, most feared, _best_. But maybe that’s made them complacent, which would go some way to explaining...

“Mark,” Chris says again, sharp. “Can you focus, please? The fucking Winklevoss are saying that they’ve got the facebook.”

That.

Mark says, “On it,” and wires in.

He calls Chris an hour later to confirm that it does look like the fucking Winklevii have the facebook. Confirm may not exactly be the right word.

Chris sighs, a static rush down the line. “Wait, I’m patching Dustin in.”

There a pause, a click and then Dustin says, “Boss.” That’s never a good sign.

“Can you...” Mark starts but Dustin is talking before he can get the question out. “I don’t know, Mark. Don’t know how they got in, or locked us out, how much they’ve taken or where they’ve gone. Nothing.”

It was a blind hope at best, that Dustin could find something when Mark couldn’t. But Dustin lives to surprise Mark with his ninja competency. Literally, on some occasions.

“They’ll need money, server space, connections, if they’re going to actually use it,” Dustin points out.

Mark says, “The Winklevii are old fashioned, they’d probably go to one of the families, a club. Maybe even to sell.” He thinks not, probably. Getting the Facebook for their own has been Cameron and Tyler’s goal for too long now, even the sums of money that the Phoenix or the Porc would pay for it wouldn’t be enough for them. They’re little rich kids who, like all spoiled children, want something because they’ve been told they can’t have it. Fucking Winklevii.

Chris sighs. “I could...” He hesitates for just a moment too long, enough time for Mark to think about the very few things that can make Chris Hughes halt in this tracks.

“You could _what_?” he asks, as coldly as he can. He has some pretty bad suspicions.

“You know those places,” Chris says. “They’re a closed world and we’ve never tried to get on their good side because we’re better than that. We don’t need them.”

“Stop stalling, Christopher. So you could...”

Chris says, “I could call Eduardo.”

“Okay,” Dustin says quickly. “So I figured there would be an awkward silence so I’m just going to start talking about nothing in particular but I might bring up the subject that calling Eduardo is probably the best thing we could do right now and he’s awesome, Mark, you know he’s awesome, you know you should let Chris call him and...”

“I think the awkward silence has been avoided successfully,” Mark breaks in. “Why. Why would you call Wardo?”

“He knows all of those kinds of people,” Chris points out. “And he’s one of us, Mark, he should be here. This is important.”

*

THEN

“Mark Zuckerberg, right?” The guy talking to him stands out at the hacking party like the sorest of thumbs. Mark had registered him when he’d first arrived, vaguely wondered what the hell he was doing here. Attractive, wearing dress pants, doesn’t have a laptop. This guy might as well be from a different planet.

“Yes?” Mark says, warily. The dude looks kind of wiry but you just never know. That tiny girl from Classics had punched like a _bastard_ , although quite why Mark’s brain is equating someone’s parent’s marital status with their ability to injure him is unclear. Things started to go a little off-track after the second round of shots.

The guy laughs. “You don’t sound very sure.”

“It depends on whether you want to know if I’m Mark Zuckerberg because your girlfriend or sister or, I don’t know, platonic life partner was up all night crying about Facemash, and you memorised that fucker’s face so that you could exact some kind of ironic revenge by smashing it in.”

“Eduardo Saverin, no girlfriend or platonic life partner, and my sister would have destroyed you herself. I wanted to say, er, good hacking, I guess?” He frowns. “I don’t actually know, I’ve been told that the actual hacking part was impressive, that’s beyond my limited tech skills. Still.” He gives Mark a huge smile, his entire expression changing in the space of a syllable. “If you happen to see Mark Zuckerberg, tell him I thought the whole thing was pretty cool.”

Mark snorts. “I’ll let him know.”

Of course at that moment Joe walks by and says, “You’re up, Zuck!” He tries to slap Mark on the back but misses, getting mostly air and the edge of Mark’s shoulder.

“Your cover is blown,” Eduardo says, shaking his head, eyes now large and serious. Mark has no idea how he’s doing that with his face.

“Damn,” Mark says. “I really hate having to burn all my possessions and shave my head.” He wanders off to take his place at the table. He’s never had a problem hacking drunk, the parts of his brain that get affected seem to be unnecessary, like the ability to code is linked directly to his fingers with no other assistance required.

After he’s run out of decent competition he finds himself going back to where Eduardo is eyeing the “punch” dubiously. “If you don’t know about hacking, then what are you doing here?”

Eduardo tilts his head and Mark realises that probably quite a lot of time has passed since the rest of this conversation happened. “I know Dustin? Dustin Moscovitz?”

Mark tries and fails to see what this guy could have in common with Dustin, with _anyone_ in his CS class. He’ll rail against stereotypes as much as the next psych student but. He pulls a doubtful face.

“I guess you could say that we have other overlapping interests,” Eduardo says, with a laugh.

“Are you going to make me guess?” Mark asks. Eduardo smiles into his cup. “What can I say.”

Mark gives Eduardo another look over. Clearly he missed something in the first sweep.

Mark wakes up the next morning on his sofa with a beer bottle and a piece of paper labeled “INTERESTS” scrawled on it on the table next to him. It has a Venn Diagram with a Dustin/hackers circle and an Eduardo circle on it. In the middle, where the overlap is, there’s just a large question mark.

*

NOW

Chris calls again after an hour or so. Mark has spent his time going over every request on their server for the last month because those bastards got in somehow and if he can work it out then he can find them and _crush them_.

“Eduardo says he might be able to help,” he tells Mark. “He’s going to come to my place on Thursday. Be there. Be smart. Be... Okay, I was going to say nice but that’s not exactly your style and it’s not like Eduardo ever cared for nice anyway.”

“I know,” Mark says. Eduardo always used nice more as an insult - I don’t know, Mark, he’s just so bland. Bland and beige and _nice_. Eduardo was emotion and extraneous movement and comments with a hidden edge in the centre of them like a sword stick. There was nothing nice about either of them, not really.

Mark swallows. He clicks the page where _his_ facebook should be again. Still nothing.

“It’s been nearly five years,” he says.

“Exactly, plenty of time for the two of you to put all that stupid shit behind you and move on,” Chris states.

Mark says, “Oh, it’s as simple as that, is it?” and it comes out flatter than he wanted. Chris makes a soft noise, a little too sympathetic. Chris had figured it out long before Mark had, after all.

“Maybe it should be,” he says. “I know you’re not actually still angry with him.”

Mark doesn’t bother with trying to lie. Chris has other plans and other projects these days, “going legit,” as he like to joke, but he can still read Mark like a book. There’s still a sign on Chris’s desk that Dustin made years ago, taken from office to office as they move, that says “Chris Hughes: Translator. French - English. Mark - Rest of the World.” He says, “Not exactly.”

“Just don’t be an asshole,” Chris instructs him. “Or at least try not to be.”

Mark thinks, just for a second, about protesting.

“Mark,” Chris warns. “Wardo is probably the only person who can get the information we need. He’s Eduardo Saverin, the clubs have to let him in.”

*

THEN

“I’m a Saverin of Miami,” Eduardo says, and grimaces at his plate. Mark doesn’t think it’s the dining hall food, for once.

On the table between them is the Venn Diagram, stained and crumpled. In the middle there is now a scribbled note that says, in all caps of victory, “CRIME.”

Mark frowns. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

Eduardo looks up sharply. “You really don’t know. Never knew?” He gestures down at the diagram.

“I take my graphs very seriously,” Mark says. They’ve been running into each other for weeks now, Eduardo turning up with Dustin seemingly at random. Eduardo likes to lean over Mark’s shoulder and make considering faces at whatever he’s working on. It’s clear that he wasn’t lying about his lack of coding knowledge, but it makes Mark laugh anyway. Eduardo has an implausibly expressive face. But sometimes Eduardo also makes comments, just small things about domains or creative commons law. They’re obviously not things that he even thinks about mentioning, knowledge so ingrained that it’s practically instinctual. And one day it just clicks.

(Eduardo had traced the letters with his finger, cheap Biro ink coming off the page and staining his skin. “I know... stuff. I can answer questions most other people wouldn’t, so certain... communities come to me with questions.”

“Not vague at all, then,” Mark had said.)

“But you’re one of the most overtly law breaking people I’ve met here,” Eduardo says. “Don’t you know anything about the criminal underworld? Did you not do any _research_?” He looks genuinely aghast. Mark bets Eduardo is one of those people who cites a source for _everything_. He’s discovered in the last couple of weeks that under all of the good clothes and the easy manner, Eduardo Saverin - of the Miami Saverins, what the hell was that anyway- is kind of a nerd.

“Didn’t seem important,” Mark says with a shrug. “I know what I can do. I’ll see what other people can do if they try and get in my way.”

Eduardo says, “Mark,” in a way that should seem judgemental but doesn’t. He spears a green bean with his fork. “There’s no good way of explaining this but my family are sort of a big deal, in that world.”

“Like the mafia?” Mark jokes.

“Kind of,” Eduardo says, calming eating another bean. Mark stares at him, tries to picture Eduardo in a suit ordering hits. If he tilts his brain just right, it sort of works.

“Are you being serious?” he asks.

“I’m sure you can find out,” Eduardo says. “You’re you. The internet has no secrets it can keep from your hacking prowess.” He waggles his fingers in an imitation of Mark. It’s a tic, Mark doesn’t know where it came from, he’s done it for as long as he can remember, linked in his brain to starting an new project.

Mark says, “Okay. Cool.” He takes a spoonful of mac and cheese - into which he has mixed peas because Eduardo has this thing about always getting green onto one’s plate because Sesame Street told him to, Mark wishes he was making this shit up - and thinks about potential.

Eduardo’s mouth crooks around a smile. “That’s all you’ve got. Cool?”

“You’re a mafioso. That is pretty cool. I mean, obviously it doesn’t make _you_ cooler,” Mark says, jabbing towards Eduardo with his spoon. Eduardo laughs loudly, tilting his head back, and people stare over at them. Eduardo doesn’t seem to notice.

*

NOW

Mark looks at Eduardo when he arrives and tries to work out if he feels any differently, after five years and too much time to dwell on should have, could have. All that conditional tense can make a person bitter. Now that he knows... Well... Now that he knows. But no, it’s still the same push-pull war of frustrated and pleased. He wants to ruffle Eduardo’s slicked back hair until he looks more like Wardo of the F. Which should have possibly been a clue. It does say “A Mark Zuckerberg production” at the bottom of every page of the facebook.

Chris was lying about the satisfactory nature of revelations. Eduardo's hair really does look stupid like that. He’s wearing a dark blue suit and carrying himself too straight, too self-contained.

Eduardo always knows the impression he’s making, he’s been conning people most of his life.

*

THEN

“Thank you so much,” Eduardo says to the barman. They take their drinks - the ones that they definitely didn’t pay for as far as Mark could see - to a table.

“Did you just...” Mark waves a hand at the drinks.

Dustin claps Wardo on the back. “Hell yes he did.”

Eduardo says, “Thanks, Dustin,” but he’s watching Mark intently. “Baby’s first con, what did you think?”

The thing that Mark will remember the most is how easily Wardo’s mouth had shaped itself around the lies. “Why did you do it?” he asks. “You can afford a round of drinks here.” Mark can’t, but that’s another story. One he doesn’t much like being the protagonist of.

“Because it’s fun.” Eduardo says. “Plus I like to show off _my_ abilities now and then. Make sure that you remember what I’m here for.”

“Like we could forget,” Dustin says with a laugh.

“You’re here to buy the drinks,” Mark teases.

*

NOW

“I’m not here for you,” Eduardo says. His eyes are fixed somewhere just over Mark’s left shoulder. “I’m here because Chris asked me and because it’s the facebook. It doesn’t belong to the Winklevosses, they didn’t make it, they certainly don’t deserve to profit from it.”

Mark finds he’s nodding along with Eduardo’s words in spite of himself. He’s right, they created facebook, their code and their ideas. The thought of Tyler’s name on the masthead of Mark’s system makes him want to smash things.

“And besides, they’re kind of tools,” Eduardo adds. He’s refused to sit several times, hovering in the middle of Chris’s front room and probably doing damage to Chris’s infinitely precious wood floors with his pacing.

“True. And it is sort of your duty as a member of the F to defend our honour,” Mark says.

It’s meant to be a joke but Eduardo goes white. “Not any more, remember,” he says. “You should do, seeing as you were the one who pushed me out.”

“You’re the one who _left_ ,” Mark says, because it’s true. “Plus you were with the Phoenix in New York, you weren’t a part of the F anyway.”

_“I was there for us as well, only you didn’t seem to understand what _undercover_ meant,” Eduardo hisses._

Mark says, “Look, you’re back now, you can help us now...” Eduardo cuts him off with a sharp noise.

“You’ve only ever wanted me when you could get something out of me, Mark Zuckerberg,” Eduardo says, vicious. “Believe me, I will never forget again.” He turns on his heel and walks out the front door.

Mark stares after him. “What the hell did he mean by that?” he asks Chris. Mark hates not being able to just read Eduardo, hated it when he went off to New York and came back angry and different, and they couldn’t seem to fit back together. And it’s worse now, like the people they’ve become don’t recognise each other. Even his goddamn hair is different.

Dustin turns to look at Mark, slow and incredulous. He says, “Mark, seriously. You have to see how it seems to him. That you only ever want him when you want something from him.”

Mark says, “Is that how it seems to _you_?” because Dustin’s face is horribly familiar, from all those months when he’d hardly speak to Mark and every time he had looked at him it was like... Like each time he saw Mark he was disappointed all over again, a fresh betrayal with every glance.

“The two of you, it was always a bit...” Chris waves his hands around.

“Sad?” Dustin offers.

“No it wasn’t,” Mark objects. Even when he was really, really mad at Eduardo he’d always had great memories of their time at Harvard.

“Okay, not sad but it wasn’t _normal_. It was like...” He looks at Chris. “Help me out here, Hughes. Surely metaphors are like, the one useful thing your fancy arts degree is good for.”

“I feel so valued,” Chris sighs.

Dustin says, “No, wait I’ve got it. It was like that movie.” He looks at them both triumphantly.

Chris says dryly, “Ah, yes, it’s suddenly all so clear.”

Dustin sits forward in his chair. There’s a blanket over the back of it that Mark recognises from way back when, the one that always got pulled out for movie nights and mornings after the night before. It’s sort of weird to see it here among Chris and Sean’s perfect furniture, but sort of not. Out of all of them Chris is the one who’s made something that feels like a home the way that their dorm room did.

“Wall.e,” Dustin says. “Wardo was bringing you lightbulbs and rubix cubes and trying to show you the wonders of the world and you were just zipping around saying, “Directive.”” He does his best robot impression. “Except for lightbulbs read servers and for Directive read facebook.”

Chris grins. “Wa-ardo,” he tries. They are terrible excuses for friends and colleagues. Mark tries not to think of Wardo’s stupid, sad eyes looking over the top of something.

“He just wanted to hold your hand, Mark,” Dustin is clearly getting into his stride. “That’s aaaaaall,” he sings.

Chris says, “Oh my god, this is so true. It’s the most accurate and tragic thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Directive,” Dustin says mournfully.

Great, now one of Mark’s favorite movies has been spoiled because he’s never going to be able to watch it without thinking of Eduardo getting struck by lightening. While holding out a router box.

“So that makes you the cockroach,” he tells Dustin, who shrugs.

“I _am_ indestructible,” he returns. “And I hope that my genius metaphor...”

“Analogy,” Chris corrects.

“Analogy. Whatever. My _genius_ has made you see the light in your stupid robot brain.”

“He thought I only brought him on board for the money?” Mark asks. He feels, well, he feels angry at Eduardo for not realising how _wrong_ that is but there’s guilt, too, strange and adult.

“Maybe not at first,” Chris says. “But later, when things were...” he pulls a face that doesn’t quite sum up the horrible charged tension between Mark and Eduardo but comes pretty close. “Bad.”

“But it wasn’t just about the money,” Mark says. “That’s stupid. He was my _best friend_.”

“And Wardo knew that?” Dustin says. He looks sort of unconvinced, which is really unfair. “You told him that?”

“Yes,” Mark says, defensively. “Of course. Just because I didn’t go around telling any person, plant, or inanimate object I came across how much I loved them every time I got stoned.”

“You tell your laptop that sober,” Dustin claims. “And me and the bush outside of Kirkland had something special.”

Chris grins. “It _was_ very understanding all of those times you fell into it.” Dustin flashes him a smile back.

“When?” Dustin says, turning back to Mark, mood switching gunshot fast. His expression is one Mark has seen across poker tables. Call.

“This is ridiculous,” Mark tries. “I don’t have a trapper keeper where I keep a BFF log.”

“Don’t try and distract me by making more than one pop culture reference in a sentence,” Dustin says. “You never said it, did you.”

Chris sits on the edge of Mark’s desk with an sigh that Mark has come to recognise as, “I despair of you as a human being, but I have grown resigned to your failings and so will not end you.” They’ve spent a long time sitting at opposite other, often with not a lot to do. Mark has had plenty of opportunity for study, categorisation and very specific naming.

“I...” And then he remembers. “After the Delancy Job. With Sy,” he says, triumphant.

Dustin stares at him. “Mark,” he says, carefully. “You know it doesn’t count if the other person doesn’t hear.”

“Oh Mark,” Chris says.

Dustin reaches out and takes Chris’s hand. “I’m sorry, I have to finish this sentence. Please try not to actually kill Mark with that pen.” He looks from Mark to Chris and back again, and then removes the whole cup of pens from Mark’s desk and holds them behind his back. “It especially doesn’t count if the other person doesn’t hear because they were _unconscious at the time_.”

Chris makes a distressed noise.

“It still counts,” Mark says. It comes out a bit petulant.

“It does not,” Chris says. “This is why we need him to come back, so that you can _tell him_. And maybe stop hating on each other from opposite sides of the world. That would be kind of satisfying for the F.”

“Look, I think we’ve already got an improbably happy ending to this story...” Mark says. “If we’re going down the route of analogy.”

“What?” Chris says.

“We’re young and we’re rich. We all made it through the first few years of running a criminal gang without getting arrest or killed. Chris met the perfect guy on a blind date, for the love of god.”

Mark doesn’t think about things like luck, he’s smart enough to make his own most of the time, but he knows that the odds have been seriously against them all making it this far. “Dustin should have died at least seven times by my count,” he adds.

“You always underestimate me,” Dustin says. “Ten at least. And I hardly think that counts as getting an improbably happy ending...”

Mark sighs.“Dustin, everyone knows you’re in love with Amy from the Stanford, okay? You’re not cut out for a clandestine Romeo and Juliet affair.”

Dustin looks shocked, like he hasn’t been spending hours on the phone ‘data gathering’ with her, which is a poor cover for making very dorky jokes and reading out horribly accented sentences in French that Chris has written out for him.

“You don’t...” Dustin says, making a vague shape with his hands. “Mind?” He bites his lip, like Mark is actually going to go all vengeful and possessive on him. The Stanford aren’t the enemy.

“It’s very romantic, we’re very happy for you.” Mark assures him. “I’m just saying. I think the F have used up all of the narrative luck we’re going to get from the universe.”

*

THEN

Dustin comes from a criminal family too, although not the same way as Eduardo. Not at all. Mark has put together a pretty good picture from the web and from things that Dustin lets slip in the middle of a long ramble about something completely unrelated.

It’s a picture of a kid and his sister who were left to fend for themselves too much, using the tricks of their parent’s trade, easy when it’s all you know. Who had to dodge loan sharks and worse. A kid who was smart but tiny, who learnt to fight.

“It was all very Karate Kid,” Dustin says. “Lots of training montages and focusing my rage on those who had done me wrong.”

He looks at Mark. “So I get it when you say you want revenge.”

Mark nods. He’d never been threatened before, not like that. He wanted to destroy them, nothing but an unoriginal gang of thugs, anyway.

“You want Chris Hughes,” Dustin tells him. “I’ve been thinking we should get him on board for a while now, anyway. This kind of thing is his specialty. He can ruin a whole life in an afternoon.”

Mark says, “I’ve never heard of him.”

“Exactly.”

But it turns out that the picture Mark had was incomplete. Well. That’s an understatement.

Chris Hughes has a cute face and perfect teeth and a newscaster accent.

Mark thinks maybe this is why he takes to Mark, Wardo and Dustin like he does. None of them look like they should be trying to take on the criminal elite.

“Good work on the Hellard job,” Chris says to Dustin, who makes a dismissive gesture and says, “Nah, it was simpler than it sounds. After the first floor, anyway.”

Mark freezes. “That was you?” he asks. He knows all the details, even though it happened before he came to Harvard. The Hellard job is pretty legendary in Boston.

Dustin gives him an odd look. “Yes.”

“You took out seven members of a notorious cartel to get to their mainframe and then redirected all of their bank transactions? I heard they lost four million dollars in a night.”

“More like three,” Dustin says. “But yes. Like I said.”

Mark says, “But I thought you were just a programmer?”

Chris’s shoulders start to shake.

“You’ll have to upgrade me,” Dustin says, with his wide, guileless grin.

Chris says, “Your problem is pretty easy, actually, with a campus like Harvard. You just start telling people that the rumour about the Ad Gang isn’t true. Be as earnest as you can. However compelling, however likely it may sound, you want them to know that it isn’t true.”

“How does that help?” Mark asks. He really hopes Dustin hasn’t brought him an idiot for a joke. He doesn’t even know what this guy majors in but he’s betting something, whatever, Artsy.

Chris gives him a big-eyed, innocent look. “The thing is, to tell them not to believe the rumour, first you have to explain to them what that rumour is.”

*

NOW

Eduardo calls Chris on Saturday. Chris transfers him to Mark without warning him first. Mark says, “That was a fast version of never.”

Eduardo hangs up.

Chris calls him back and makes a lot of apologetic “hmm”s. When Mark gets Wardo on the line he’s laughing.

“You just did that for the hell of it, didn’t you?” Mark says, smiling, even as Chris makes throat cutting signals. He knows that laugh.

“Of course,” Eduardo says. “But really, Mark, what did you expect?”

“What did you? You know I don’t do small talk and pleasantries.” _Nice_ , Mark thinks, and shakes his head.

“I know grovelling isn’t exactly in your nature, but I’m going to need something better than this. I can’t...” Eduardo sighs. “I don’t need a rerun of the ‘Mark Zuckerberg Can’t See Anyone Else’s Point of View’ show. Been there, got the emotional scars, thanks but no thanks.”

“I didn’t know,” Mark starts. “I...” He did know. Eduardo had been _so_ angry, the kind that people only ever are when they are really, truly hurt. “I’m sorry, I guess,” he says. He is. Has been for a really long time, but he has to say it now, even though it still feels like showing your belly to the enemy. He has to get Eduardo back, he _has to_.

Eduardo makes a sharp, punched out noise.

“I’m sorry too,” he says. “And I’m sorry for... I couldn’t, you know, with the Phoenix, I couldn’t say no. My father... You know how it is with him.” Mark knows. That’s the thing that makes Eduardo so good at conning. He genuinely wants to be whatever people most want him to be.

Eduardo sighs. “But I shouldn’t have... I know I messed up. It was stupid, and I’m sorry, okay?”

Mark knew that, really, because Eduardo is that kind of person. He’d probably known that for years, if he’d thought about it. It’s stupid to... It’s stupid that it matters so much just to hear the words.

“Okay,” Mark says. There’s a long pause, like Eduardo is waiting for something. But they’ve both said sorry. Mark really doesn’t think there’s anything else to add, but Eduardo can be weird about this kind of thing.

“Come back, come to our headquarters. It’ll just be you and me and Chris and Dustin?” Mark tries.

“Yeah, I heard Sean got busted,” Eduardo says. “I don’t suppose you had anything to do with it.”

“I can’t comment on that,” Mark says, because he’s still a little raw and he’s not going to admit that Wardo had been very, very right about Sean. Mark likes Sean, still has that slight tinge of awe when he thinks about him, but Sean could not be trusted with the facebook. Which is really funny in that way that isn’t at all amusing.

The phone line makes Eduardo's laugh thin, pulls all the warmth out of it. Or maybe it’s the mention of Sean, who’d always made Eduardo bitter-edged and petty.

Eduardo says, “If I say yes, you understand that I’m just going to help you get the facebook back and then I’m going back to Singapore. This isn’t... We aren’t the F any more.”

“Got it,” Mark says.

*

THEN

“Is that us?” Mark asks.

Dustin grins, huge, and bounces on the balls of his feet. “It’s us,” he says.

“Wardo, come look, we made the FBI watch list,” Mark calls over his shoulder. He looks over the page again. He sort of wants to screencap it. Then he notices that Wardo has failed to appear where he should be, next to Mark and leaning over to peer at his screen, body angled just right to avoid being in the way of Mark’s use of the mouse. He’s been conditioned through repeated elbowing. He turns his chair round.

Eduardo is standing in the middle of the room, staring at Mark in what looks like disbelief. Mark gestures a ‘what?’ at him with his hands. Eduardo runs his hands through his hair. He says, “Do you really think this is a good thing? We don’t want to be on the watch list, Mark, that means that the FBI are _watching us_.”

“Oh, like they can get to us,” Mark scoffs. They can’t even keep Mark out of their system for more than a day.

Eduardo comes to read over Mark’s shoulder. “Mark, why are they calling us the F?” They’ve joked about being the Famous Five before, or possibly the Famous Four because no one is really sure if Andrew counts. No one is sure if Andrew exists out of an IRC channel, to be honest.

Mark says, “I thought it was cooler than a kid’s book reference.” He brings up the graphic embedded into the code.

The four of them gather around Mark’s chair to stare at it, as quiet as Mark’s ever heard them, like no one wants to break the moment. Mark steals a look up at Eduardo, sees the moment when he’s convinced, when the possibility breaks over him. It’s _perfect_.

“Cool, right?” Mark says, noncommittally. Eduardo doesn’t take his eyes off the screen.

*

NOW

Eduardo says, “Classy,” raising his eyebrows. He gestures around at the mismatched collection of chairs and tables.

It’s a temporary HQ, they did a salt-and-burn on the last place after the Winklevoss breach. They’re careful, these days, although it’s probably not a standard measurement of adulthood, but Mark will claim responsibility points wherever he can get them. There’s actually minimal burning involved in the procedure, which Dustin always looks distressingly disappointed about.

Mark shrugs.

“Wardo!” Dustin says delightedly. He gets up from his chair and hesitates for a second, then wraps Eduardo up in a hug. He says something that Mark can’t hear but it makes Eduardo laugh, full blooded and rounded out.

He _was_ Dustin’s friend first.

Dustin puts his arm around Eduardo’s shoulders and walks them over to the big table in the middle of the room. He sweeps the paper and cans into a pile at one corner, and sits down.

“There,” he says, in a satisfied voice. “Now we’re ready for a team meeting.”

Eduardo gives the chair nearest to him a suspicious look but sits. Chris comes out of their tiny kitchen, beaming at Eduardo who grins back. It’s not that Mark _minds_ that they’ve all managed to carry on being friends, it’s just that... Well. He minds.

“Are you coming to sit down?” Chris asks, with only the slightest hint of threat in his voice.

Mark is used to that kind of level of veiled menace, he deals with it on the regular, so he says, “No, some of us are still working, you know.”

He refreshes the page again.

“How did they even _do that_?” Eduardo says. Mark glances back over his shoulder and Eduardo is looking past him to the clean white page with a stricken look. Mark knows that feeling, his stomach still turns every time he sees it.

“They got into our repo, stripped us bare. It means they have everything that makes the facebook the facebook,” Mark tells him. Wardo’s probably not had to speak tech in a while.

Chris says, “Andrew was sending us a new laptop, specially modified, of course. We use an intermediary and they must have worked out who it was. They knew about Andrew, because some people can’t keep their mouths shut. Anyway, they installed a keylogger on it. It was easy for them from there to get everything.”

“We never even thought to check,” Dustin admits, wincing. ‘Going soft in their old age’ was how he’d described it when they’d finally worked it out. Mark can see now that he’d been coasting for a while, what with Chris off changing the world and Dustin and Amy and their thousand new ideas a week. The facebook had been so all consuming, so _challenging_ , but it hadn’t stayed that way forever. And now it was gone.

Chris says, “We’ve put some feelers out, and no one else has heard much about this, which a relief. But it’s only a matter of time before word gets out and a bidding war starts.”

“We can con it out of them,” Eduardo says. They all turn to look at him. “It’s the only way we’re getting it back.”

“We?” Chris asks.

Eduardo shrugs. “I want the facebook back.” Eduardo’s voice changes a little when he mentions the facebook, just like Mark’s does, like the very idea of it still produces an unavoidable tone of awe.

*

THEN

They’re outside the back door of the casino, Wardo dressed like a tourist in shorts and an appalling bright shirt which he seems to be enjoying wearing more than Mark feels is necessary. He looks wide eyed and guileless still, half stuck in the character. Mark loves to watch Eduardo fool people, Mark the only person in the room who knows who Wardo really is; the myriad deadly marvels of him a secret that none of them know.

“Mark,” Wardo says, with a snap in his voice that means it’s not the first time he’s said it.

“The Winklevoss twins wanted me to create a secure network for them and their friend,” Mark tells him, because the thought has been running in the background of his head all day. “Anywhere they are in the world, their network will connect them to each other. And their club, probably.” Mark still can’t quite believe that Tyler and Cameron have had offers, multiple offers, from the clubs when they need Mark’s help to achieve _anything_. They won’t even look his way, just because he doesn’t have pictures of his grandfather’s grandfather being sworn in.

Eduardo brings his hands out of his pockets to blow on them. “This is what you brought me into the desert night to tell me, Mark? I’m from Brazil, okay?”

“Okay,” Mark says, confused because yes, obviously. “Anyway, I was thinking, it’s the asset that people are always asking us for, right? Secure lines, better, VPNs, anonymous IP addresses, ways to communicate easily and safely. That and identities. Get me on this database, erase me from this list. We’ve got a great system for casinos already.”

Eduardo is a notorious card counter, his face is on systems all over the world, recognition software programmed to flag him as the highest threat level as soon as he sets foot on the casino floor.

That is until Mark reprograms it.

Eduardo nods.

“What if we took that and made it one system, a way of making another identity, a perfect one, and then you could communicate with that other person via these new selves. Imagine it, Wardo, if you knew that you could share anything. Totally unhackable, untraceable.”

Eduardo’s smile is sharp edged. “If you can do that... Wow.”

“It could change everything,” Mark agrees, numbers already forming patterns in the air by Eduardo's head.

“I can help. I have some ideas about the...” Eduardo starts.

“I’ll need start up cash,” Mark says.

*

NOW

“I want you guys to be safe. And...” Eduardo looks around their makeshift office. “Nostalgia is a stupidly powerful thing, I suppose.” There are pizza boxes everywhere, and the whiteboard on the wall still has the last round of Chris and Marilyn’s game of Extreme Hangman on it. There are paper planes on the floor around Mark’s desk, a testament to his focus and Dustin’s boredom. There’s Chris’s desk with its ever-present sign.

Mark thinks it’s more than hope that if Chris asked, Eduardo would say _No, I’m not angry anymore._

_Maybe he has, Mark doesn’t know what Chris and Eduardo have talked about in the past few years. Chris won’t tell him and they never communicate by email or facebook._

_But Eduardo’s always been better at this. A better person, probably, all told. He could probably hide being angry with Mark, play up some other emotion, but he’s got no reason to. And when it comes to the big things, Eduardo can’t help himself, he goes big or he goes home._

_Mark hopes that a lack of anger equates forgiveness. He shouldn’t want to exploit Eduardo’s better nature to make that definite, but hey, criminal. He will._

_“Thank you,” he says._

_Chris gives him an approving look. “And Mark’s not just saying that to get out of fieldwork.”_

_“Isn’t he banned from leaving the van?” Eduardo asks, straight-faced, when Mark remembers very clearly that he’d _taken part in that vote_._

Mark says, “Just one of the reasons that we couldn’t do it without you.”

*

THEN

Mark closes up his last line, and the site appears on his screen. “And we’re done,” he says.

The page is mostly white with a small text box in the middle. Eduardo peers over from the bed, and then gets up to lean one hand on Mark’s desk. There’s always a space there for it, just to the right of the keyboard, in between papers and cups and tuna cans.

It’s simple, “The F” written at the top, white on blue.

(“If you’re going to treat your burgeoning criminal empire as a company, you should look like one.” Andrew had said. “Brand yourselves.”)

“Mark Zuckerberg. Founder, Master and Commander, Enemy of the State,” Eduardo reads. Half way through his voice changes, becomes more dramatic. He grins at Mark. “It looks good. Really good.”

Mark reads over the words again, the last step, and the first one. Branded, his name burnt into the site for everyone to see.

“I have no idea what this is going to mean to my father,” Eduardo says, still staring at the screen, voice flattened out the way it always does when he talks about Ricardo. Mark thinks that maybe he’ll charge the Saverin family a little more to use the facebook, a dollar extra for every time Eduardo’s expression has dimmed at the thought of them. Mark could live like a king just on the money he’d get from that alone.

“He’ll get it,” Mark promises.

“Really?” Eduardo says hopefully. It’s so dumb, that he should care if one old man understands that the F are changing _everything_ here, that it’s something a Saverin can be proud to be a part of. If his father is so stupid he can’t see that, then what does his opinion matter anyway?

“Sure.” Mark looks down at the notepad. “Oh, I need at least another two laptops.”

Eduardo frowns. “I’ll make a list,” he says. He still sounds a little hollow. He catches Mark’s eye for a second, then swallows and looks away.

“‘Paid assassin and no longer expendable programmer’,” he muses. “Dustin will be pleased.”

“Not all of us can be Saverins of Miami, after all,” Mark says, and Eduardo knocks him with his shoulder.

*

NOW

“So I finally get to meet _the_ Eduardo Saverin,” Marilyn says, spreading another sheaf of papers out over the table. “I’m very excited.”

“It’s just Wardo,” Mark says with a half-shrug. Maybe they shouldn’t have kept Marilyn from meeting him until now, it’s built up some weird kind of mystique, and it’s not like they’re not going to get along like the proverbial burning house. They can bond over unnecessary business attire. But they’d agreed that Eduardo had to be brought back in stages, first the address of the HQ, then getting to know the other members, and then - although Mark isn’t sure about this one - giving him the IRC channels that they’re using these days.

“Oh, hey, is this Eduardo why Dustin used to call me the ‘new wardo’?” Marilyn asks, dropping into the conversation far too lightly. “I thought it was some kind of stupid code that I didn’t know yet.”

“You are _not_ and never have been a new Eduardo.” Mark snaps. Marylin tilts her head.

Mark tries to remember that he likes that she can see right through people.

He says, “Eduardo was our fifth member, when we started. He was the numbers guy, you know? And a thief. Oh, and our go between. And our legal consultant.” The last one was always more of their joke than a reality, Mark isn’t sure why he said it. “He quit.” He tries to make it sound as uninteresting as possible. He’s been told he’s good at that.

Mark wants to wire back in but he can’t focus on his laptop now, the sharp, bright lights of the main office glinting off the screen. Too much glass to reflect everything back at him. It’s a stupid place to code, really. He should know better.

Marilyn raises her eyebrows. “Jeez, Mark, I’m not sure I want to be the new Eduardo. If I wanted to be overworked and pointlessly stressed I would have stuck with being a lawyer. Is that why he quit?”

“Not exactly,” Mark says.

Chris slides into the chair next to her and slides a box of salad at them both. “Someone has to make sure that the pair of you have more than one meal a day between you,” he says. He frowns at Mark. “What are you two plotting?”

“Oh nothing,” Marilyn says. “I was just asking Mark about Eduardo. I get that it’s complicated between you all.”

Chris lets out a snort of laughter and stares helplessly at Mark. Mark glowers into his salad. Chris is the worst.

*

THEN

Chris has always been awesome but he gets extra awesome points for not making a Face of Judgment when he finds Mark halfway through a bottle. He just gets another tumbler from the kitchen and knocks back a healthy measure.

“Oh my god, what is this,” Chris says with a wince. He swallows again, experimentally and shudders. “Why is it... Ugh.”

“It was all we had left,” Mark explains. “And you get used to the taste and the whole,” he waves a hand, “burning thing.”

“I thought Andrew sent us some beer? Fancy European stuff.” Chris takes a deep breath and another drink.

Mark gestures under the table, or the Bottle Graveyard as he’s been referring to it in his head. “He did.” Mark leans back, cradling his glass carefully in his hand.

Chris bumps his shoulder. “So, is this random Drink All of The Alcohol Night, or are we getting trashed for a purpose?”

“Dustin says we have to hire someone to replace Eduardo. Because Wardo’s not coming back,” Mark explains. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Chris refill his glass. “I thought you didn’t like it. With the juddering.”

“I need to be _much_ drunker to get through this conversation,” Chris tells him solemnly.

Mark focuses on the ceiling tiles, counts squares. “There’s no conversation. He was stupid, I was angry, we had a fight, he over-reacted, he left.” It sounds... right like this, a nice clean linear progression.

“Left? Wow, that’s an unexpectedly polite version of the truth from you,” Chris, who has been a buffer zone between Mark and the world for a while now, says. “I remember it more being a vicious, miserable stalking off because it looked like you didn’t give a shit about him. And I wouldn’t have called it just a fight, either.”

“That wasn’t what... He was being an idiot. I needed him out here. I wanted him...”

And there’re no other words to that sentence.

Fuck.

“Fuck.”

Chris puts his arm round Mark. “Took you long enough,” he says, soft and amused and a little bit resigned.

It makes sense. Mark’s always been good at following tangled strings back to their source, the things that make people _tick_. But he’s can admit, at least now, that he’s not good at applying that to himself, too close up to see it, wood for the trees.

He knows that the New York Eduardo that he created in his head wasn’t real. That Eduardo went off to the city, kissed ass for his own profit, because that Wardo didn’t think they could succeed, didn’t think they were going to make back the money he’d lent. That Wardo could wear suits all day just like he’d always wanted, the freak, and go to Phoenix club parties at night. Parties that wouldn’t let Mark past the coat room.

It really wasn’t all that rational. At least now Mark can put a pin in it, a reason _why_. That should be some comfort. It’s more of a body blow.

“So, when you said ‘Mark’s always been crazy about Eduardo’ you meant...” Mark says.

Chris pats Mark’s shoulder sympathetically. Oh.

It’s not a surprise, really. Dustin and Mark have had muttered conversations about mutant empath genes before.

“Everyone had worked it out?” It’s a question but more out of hope than anything.

“It was suitably greek and we were the chorus,” Chris says. “The chorus always know what’s what.”

*

NOW

“Stop being a creepy stalker,” Dustin says, coming up behind Mark in that stupidly silent way of his. Mark, to his credit, only jumps a bit. Hardly at all, really.

“It doesn’t count as being a stalker if he knows I’m here,” Mark says. As he’d predicted, Eduardo and Marilyn have clicked perfectly and are now half hidden behind an enormous pile of books on the other side of the room.

“And that’s why we have a lawyer on this team. Because, er, _yes it does,_ and even if it didn’t you should stop because you’re _being creepy_ ,” Dustin insists.

Marilyn nods before Eduardo has even finished his sentence. She really seems to get him.  
Effortlessly.

Mark doesn’t even know what to call him. He’s pretty sure that he forfeited all rights to ‘Wardo’ a long time ago, but it’s just _weird_ , because Chris and Dustin use it a lot and Mark has to keep biting back the nickname. And ‘Eduardo’ feels too formal. They’re already too polite with each other, reduced to small talk and business. He’s never had to think about being friends with Eduardo before, never had to _try_. He would like to just be sure about one thing, so he can build the rest on it.

“Wardo?” he calls. Eduardo looks up, but he’s frowning. Eduardo, then.

“It’s... I was wondering if you’d heard anything about the rumours that Tom’s group had been disbanded, we’ve been getting reports to that effect for a while, but nothing concrete,” Mark spins.

Eduardo says, “Nothing more than rumours, no,” and turns back to his books. Mark sighs.

Dustin is grinning in a way that usually ends badly for everyone else in the vicinity. “Oh my god. This is _perfect_.”

Mark tries to stare him down but Dustin has grown upsettingly immune over the years.

“Oh, the last time I saw that face. Oh man. She’s Eduardo’s Sean Parker and you’re his. Him. Perfect.”

*

THEN

Mark wants to buy Christy all the stupid green drinks in the world because Sean Parker is... Yeah. This is Sean Parker - _Napster_ \- he’s basically a legend, Mark’s watched his ‘career’ for _years_.

Eduardo is still pissed off that the guy was late. He’s trying his best to hide it but Mark can usually spot when Wardo’s performing and that smile is too bright, glittering sharp and cold like frost. Wardo _is_ sort of weird about this kind of thing; everything being in order and colour coded and on schedule.

Sean says, “Seriously, guys, I’ve been in this game a long time. Let me tell you about the time I got into - ”

“You got _caught_ ” Eduardo says.

Sean smirks again, smooth as Wardo has ever been. “They set me up. Trust me, I’ve never left a trace on anyone’s system. They had to plant shit on me, otherwise they never would have got _near_.” He launches into the story of his first hack, hands flying everywhere.

Mark’s never heard anyone talk about coding like this, who looks like this and sounds like this. Sean looks so at ease out here in the physical world, like he could control it just as easily as he could anything virtual. And he can do that too, Mark has seen the proof and even if he hadn’t... Sean makes worlds appear with his words, a sense of hope and of shining, endless possibility that Mark rarely experiences away from a keyboard. Mark’s been accused of romanticising programming more than once, but it’s true, for him at least. You can take an empty screen and turn it into something, a tangible thing for use or for beauty or just because you can. _Because it’s there_.

He thinks Sean would understand, if he said that out loud.

Eduardo keeps trying to interrupt Sean, which makes Mark wince because, one, he really wants to hear what Sean has to say, can’t Eduardo see that, and two, it’s making it embarrassingly clear to Sean that Wardo really doesn’t understand hacking.

Maybe it’s because Christy keeps laughing at Sean’s jokes.

“Maybe you can use your ‘expertise’ to help us settle an argument,” Eduardo says to  
Sean, who seems unruffled by the obvious condescension. And Wardo calls Mark unprofessional.

*

NOW

“It’s not the same, Dustin,” Mark says. He’s not going to act like an unreasonable dick to Marilyn. He really likes her. Whereas Eduardo seemed determined to hate Sean on sight, and things had only disintegrated from there.

Dustin look from Mark to Eduardo and back again. “I’m going to find Chris and tell him about this. I love it when I get to make his day,” he says. “Although maybe he’ll start muttering to himself about the blind leading the blind again, and then I get worried that he’s going to just start weeping softly to himself.”

“Dustin...”

“Marky Mark Mark. Didn’t you ever wonder why Eduardo hated Sean so much?”

Mark looks down at the keyboard, trying to work out if he can just delete the jumble of nonsense he’s been typing for the last fifteen minutes or so without Dustin noticing. “Because Sean said he was wrong. Repeatedly.”

*

THEN

“I think it’s time to start making money from the facebook. Mark thinks that we shouldn’t go to the other groups, the clubs, with it.”

Sean nods at Eduardo slowly, and then swings his attention, his smile, to Mark. “I’m going to have to go with Zuckerberg on this one.” Mark feels the tiny adrenaline punch of a win.

“This is, I mean, you don’t even know what this is yet. If you go to the clubs, cap in hand, they’re just going to think you’ve some new kind of scheme and they’ll take it from you and never look your way again. They want nice submissive minions who will wear suits and say ‘Yes sir’, and roll over so that they can screw them from the front _and_ the back.”

Eduardo pulls a scandalised face, like he’s never said anything worse than “dang it” in his life. It’s not the end of the world to be wrong sometimes, Mark wants to say, not that it would change anything. There’s only so much he can do against a lifetime’s conditioning.

“The facebook, what you guys are doing, it could be a game changer. But you have to do it on your own terms. It has to be this cool, exclusive thing that is making you guys unbeatable. They should come to you, come to you and _beg_ to be let on.”

“Exactly,” Mark says. “Yes. Exactly.” He’s been this saying for _months_ , it’s ridiculous to carry around this idea that somehow they can’t do this by themselves. They can. _Mark_ can.

“Vive la revolution,” Sean says. Eduardo rolls his eyes. Again.

*

NOW

He stays late with Dustin and Eduardo that night, eating chinese food with plastic forks. Chris and Marilyn have been gone for hours; places to be, people waiting at home to have dinner with them. Mark is recreating as much of the infrastructure as they can, so at least they can get the secure VPN running again. He doesn’t mind using IRC but it’s only so secure. And it’s not _his_ , he can’t control it properly.

Eduardo has been quiet for a while. Mark wonders if he’s caught up in the past too, now that it’s all so present again.

Eduardo turns to look out of the window, profile outlined in the dimming light. Mark knows that Eduardo is attractive, _obviously_ , but sometimes Mark catches sight of him and he's so handsome it hurts, sweet-sharp like pressing your thumb into a bruise.

“This reminds me of New York,” he says, quietly. “Except the climate is different, obviously, the way the heat feels, it’s all to do with the humidity, not only the level but the type of water in the air. Anyway. I was always staying too late and grabbing take out. I’d sit in the window of my apartment and eat noodles and look at the city.”

Eduardo never talked much about what he was doing that summer. He’d call, sometimes, and they’d talk about the facebook and their friends and a hundred other things but they never really talked about what Wardo was actually doing on a day to day basis. Maybe that was where things started to get dangerous.

“I assumed you were being wined and dined by the Phoenix?” Mark asks, because he had.

“When? I had to work all day and then wait for pretty much everyone else to leave so that I could gather information for us,” Eduardo says, in a tone that implies all of that was obvious. “So, no. I mostly just remember being tired.”

Dustin leans into Wardo’s side. He slides the last spring roll from his plate to Eduardo’s.

What Mark remembers about that summer is the warmth of the Palo Alto sun, the constant hum of computers and Sean’s voice, hypnotic, and the occasional grounding bump that was the realisation of the lack of Eduardo.

*

THEN

“We can’t stay in Boston for the summer, obviously. We need new opportunities, a chance to make the facebook happen somewhere the clubs can’t interfere. We need to be where it’s happening, Sean says...”

“I swear to god, Mark, if I hear that phrase one more time...” Mark doesn’t need to look over at where Eduardo is sitting, cross legged on Chris’s bed in a nest of Econ notes and text books. Eduardo always likes to study on Chris’s bed for some reason. Mark knows the expression that goes with that voice. With any mention of Sean.

He says, “Anyway, Wardo. Palo Alto is that place. I’ve rented us this great house, it’s got a pool and everything.” The pictures make it look amazing, set against a backdrop of cloudless skies. This is going to be their summer, Mark can feel it in his bones.

Eduardo says, “Mark. I can’t go to Palo Alto.”

Now Mark _has_ to look at him. Wardo doesn’t look like he’s joking.

“The Phoenix, they’ve... They’ve offered me an apprenticeship of sorts. In their headquarters in New York. I’ve already told my father.”

Mark says, “Are you serious? Blow them off, Wardo. We don’t _need them_.” But Eduardo has that set to his shoulders. You can usually push him pretty far, but he has his limits. Which isn’t to say that Mark doesn’t like to test them, now and then, for fun and profit. But there’s always a sticking point, and Ricardo Saverin is often it.

“When were you going to tell me about Palo Alto?” Eduardo demands.

“When were you going to tell me about New York,” Mark counters. Mark had a plan, and it certainly didn’t involve Eduardo skipping out on the F for the. Fucking hell.

Wardo makes an exasperated gesture, throwing his hands up to the heavens like he’s asking what exactly he did to deserve this, which Mark thinks is pretty fucking rich. “I’ve been telling you about the stupid Phoenix stuff for months, I thought you were doing that thing you do where you shut down any conversation that makes you feel inadequate but were you really not listening?”

The Phoenix have been making Eduardo jump through all kinds of stupid hoops. Mark thought he and Wardo were on the same side of this joke, laughing because it was so stupid that Wardo would ever replace Mark and the F with _them_.

Wardo tilts his head as he stares, like he does sometimes when he’s solving equations, as if he can make the solution appear by looking at it at an angle.

“It’s only for the summer, Mark,” he says, soothing soft.

Mark turns back to his laptop. “Whatever. You can get us useful intel while you’re there.”

*

NOW

Eduardo says, “I could probably still use my contacts there to get more information. If the Winklevosses are trying to start a bidding war, the Phoenix will know.”

“The Stanford haven’t heard anything,” Dustin tells them. Eduardo raises his eyebrows at Mark, who says, “Oh, Dustin has a ‘contact’ over there.”

“And by contact you really mean...”

“Girlfriend,” Mark confirms.

Eduardo’s face transforms into something bright and delighted. “You never mentioned anything about that to me,” he says to Dustin.

Dustin goes a bit pink around the ears. “It’s... I wasn’t... I didn’t tell anyone.”

“You mean to tell me that Mark worked it out?” Eduardo says, with a really unnecessary amount of skepticism.

“I think it was around the time of the conversation where Dustin, no word of a lie, called English a slutty language because it’s just begging you to verb its nouns.”

Eduardo’s face contorts into some unholy combination of mocking and enamoured. “That’s the most... Oh man. The mating ritual of the painfully dorky.”

Dustin shakes his head, but he can’t stop grinning, and this, _this_ is what that summer should have been like.

*

THEN

Sean had just nodded and said, “Wardo still didn’t come out?”, nothing more, but Mark knows what Sean wouldn’t say, that Mark should resent Wardo and, well, maybe he’s right. Why shouldn’t Mark, when Eduardo was out there when Mark needs him here and he’s just there for his own profit and to make friends with jocks who all wear ties even on weekends.

It’s just easier to be pissed at Wardo.

They still have his money, though, and Mark spends with impunity, hardware arriving from Andrew’s secret lair every other day, practically. They called it the facebook as a joke, when Mark used his Facemash files to get a repository of pictures but it’s stuck, and now people are talking about them, it. The facebook takes shape under Mark’s hands, and it’s going to be _amazing_.

He and Dustin code for business and hack for fun, which makes a weird change. Mark makes Chris’s facebook identity have Dustin’s Harvard picture for weeks, until Dustin finally manages to crack his encryption and replaces it.

 _ive always hated that fucking picture_ he types to Mark as it vanishes from the system. Mark looks up over his screen to where Dustin is grinning. Mark doesn’t really understand, Dustin looks pretty much the same as he did in his freshman facebook picture, maybe a little older, a bit more certain, a bit less sweet. _what do i win_

 _this can of red bull with skittles dropped into it_ Mark replies and slides it over the table.

Dustin types _wardo would go insane if he saw this_ , sipping from the can with one hand and gesturing around the room with the other.

Mark tabs out of the chat. He’s got so much to do.

*

NOW

“It’s Amelia - Amy Ritter,” Dustin rushes out. “I didn’t... I know you know she used to work for Sean.”

Eduardo stops dead still, chopsticks poised midair. He has to be aware of the picture he’s making, he has to.

“Dustin,” he says, soft and shocked. “You can’t think I’d care about that. I just...” He smiles at Dustin, an uncomplicated thing of easy affection. “She’s great. I’m so glad that you’re happy.”

Mark says, “She’s way out of your league, by the way.”

Eduardo nods, bumps Dustin with his shoulder. “I also know that she stopped working with Sean years ago, although she still seems to like him, god only knows why. And even if she hadn’t...” He shrugs, takes another piece of chicken out of the box effortlessly. Mark should really have noticed before how Eduardo uses his body like punctuation. “Being mad at Sean Parker for being a dick is like being mad at the rain for being wet.”

*

THEN

Mark is so tired that he can’t remember what they’re fighting about, only that Eduardo had yelled more words at Mark than he’d spoken. And that Eduardo was blaming Mark personally for getting himself soaked to the bone, when any other person would have gotten under cover and wouldn’t be dripping melodramatically onto the carpet.

“Left behind? When you said, ‘Wardo, get me the Phoenix encryption data,’ I said yes, even though I was new and it was suspicious of me to be asking for that kind of information - ”

“They think they’re so clever, like no-one will recognise the Jabberwocky as the key to their-”

“- I don’t want that guy as part of this group, Mark,” Eduardo says, and it would be a non sequitur except that this whole conversation has been stunningly non-linear, and it would be an expected repetition except that Eduardo can’t seem to help himself when it comes to Sean.

The problem with Sean and Wardo is that they are too alike and too different. Sean can do that Wardo thing where he smiles at someone and they want to tell him their secrets and let him in their front door. But he doesn’t see the world the same. Wardo believes in all of these things like cost-risk analysis and that you always go to the clubs first and and that you should keep to a stupid sleep schedule defined by the _sun_.

For a master criminal, Eduardo really like rules, is what Mark’s saying here, whereas Sean really doesn’t give a shit.

And Mark cannot, he cannot, they’ve yelled and stared each other down, repeated each other over and over _get left behind_ and _can’t come out_ and he is _done_.  
“You’re not moving here this summer, are you?” he says, into the charged silence.

Eduardo’s hunched into himself, and his coat looks too big for him, a kid playing at being a businessman. He looks as exhausted as Mark feels, and neither of them have ever got this way about arguing with each other before.

“And you’re not getting rid of Sean,” he states. Mark tries to take some comfort in the fact that at least they still know each other that well.

A week later Wardo is gone again, as per, and they’re in a club that Mark is pretty sure they _weren’t_ on the guestlist for, and it’s like something out a movie or another world or those - admittedly slightly creepy - fantasies Mark had about what being in the Porc would be like.

He thinks about how impressed his younger self was with Eduardo getting them free drinks once in a while and laughs to himself. At himself.

Sean has taken a dramatic pause, seriously, is there some kind of school somewhere.

“Yes?” Mark says, because he knows what Sean is doing, he knows, with this story about a guy and the clubs and betrayal, he knows. But still...

“They tossed him off the Golden Gate Bridge,” Sean finishes, punchline kick.

Mark shakes his head but it’s... Eduardo knows so much about the F, every word he says to the Phoenix is a risk. He tries to remember how Eduardo had smiled at the screen, how he’d said “This is _our thing_ ,” sure. But then, Wardo always _sounds_ sure. It doesn’t mean that he is.

He shakes his head, takes a sip of his drink and changes the subject as fast as he can, which is easy because Sean always wants to talk about himself.

And then the next day Mark finds out that Eduardo has given the Phoenix his access code for the facebook.

They could find the F with that, if they wanted. Find Mark, find his family, find Dustin and Chris, even Andrew. It would be hard, near impossible, maybe, but they _could_.

Mark feels cold all over, and Sean looks so, so smug. Eduardo is Mark’s best friend, and Mark had been _so sure_ and shit, this is embarrassing.

“We knew this would happen,” Sean says. _We_ , inviting Mark in. Mark feels the hot, simple rush of anger, and slides over to Sean’s side of the table.

*

NOW

It shouldn’t feel the same, but it does. Wardo off to gather information from the Phoenix in the name of the F, Mark sitting in an office in Palo Alto waiting for the other shoe to drop. Eduardo - or whatever the name is on the passport that he’s used - has flown to New York and it’s only for a couple of days and he’s not even Mark’s anymore, can’t betray them really, isn’t leaving because he’s not... The point is, it’s _not_ the same.

Things are different, now, better in a lot of ways and maybe Mark should be glad that things are different.

He still doesn’t remember to get in touch first, although he meant to, but when Wardo calls to gloat about the bagel he’s eating - bastard - Mark _listens_. They can’t talk about any business stuff because cell phones are so far from being secure it’s not even close to being funny, but they can talk about New York and food and Wardo’s apparently terrible hotel.

“I could get you into another one,” Mark says, pulling up some hotel websites.

“You... could?” Eduardo says, a frown in his voice.

“Yes, booking systems are really easy,” Mark tells him, slightly offended.

Eduardo makes a noise that Mark can’t identify. “No, it’s just... That would be great, Mark, thank you.”

“Hey,” Mark says, really offended now. “I can... I can be nice, Wardo.” The stupid thing about Eduardo, probably the thing that makes him Mark’s... whatever... is that Mark doesn’t even have to try, doesn’t have to think about the things he does that Eduardo lights up at. He’s accidentally a better person for him.

*

THEN

“Come on!” Dustin yells, and Mark sees Eduardo burst out of the doors but it’s too late, far too late. The explosion rocks the van and knocks out the camera on the back door. Mark swears and switches to the roof camera.

Sy and Dustin are pelting towards the van, but Mark can’t see Eduardo. He tries the other cameras and eventually spots a small, black shape on the ground. “Dustin, Eduardo’s down,” he snaps into his comm. Dustin stops and looks back. “Go get him,” Mark orders. “You too, Sy.”

“Like hell I will,” Sy says. Mark can just make out his face on the monitor, as he gesticulates angrily at Dustin.

“Dustin, make him if you have to,” Mark says, uncaring. “Just. Get Wardo back to the van.” He wrenches his headset off, makes for the doors. He pulls them open just in time to help haul Eduardo up to lie on the floor, and then kneels next to him, trying to see where the injury is. “Drive,” he yells, tracing the blood running down Wardo’s cheek into his hair.

Sy leans his hands on his thighs and pants, “What the hell, Mark, we hardly got out of there as it was.”

Mark says, “What, you think I should I have left him there?” The van lurches round the corner and Mark has to pull Eduardo’s head onto his knees to keep him steady.

“Why not?” Sy says. Mark makes a mental note not to work with this guy again. He’s clearly a dick.

“You don’t just leave your best friend to bleed out on a pavement, Sy,” he says. He’s still combing through Eduardo’s hair, fingers gentle in the soft strands of it. You can never be too careful with head injuries.

*

NOW

“It’s the Porcelli,” Eduardo says as soon as he gets through the door. Everyone stops what they’re doing. Eduardo puts his bags down, and Mark is unsettingly glad to see him. “That’s who the Winklevii and minions are dealing with.”

“It would be,” Dustin says, rolling his eyes. The Winklevoss ethos does fit well with the Porcelli, a relic of another age, when the clubs ruled more than the underworld, and there were duels fought for honour, and other pointless shit.

“Can you check that, Chris?” Mark asks. Chris raises his eyebrows but takes his phone and goes out into the hall. Mark is about to ask why Chris left the room when he spots Eduardo getting up slowly, rolling his shoulders like he’s getting ready for a fight. Oh.

“Really?” Eduardo says. “Really, Mark? You don’t... No.” He strides across the room to Mark. “You don’t get to be the person who doesn’t trust anyone.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Eduardo, I just thought, you never know, three sources, right?” Mark says. He’s trying to slow this down but Eduardo is pacing backwards and forwards in front of him, because Eduardo can’t do anything by halves.

Eduardo says, “No, I cannot do this again, Mark, I should get to be the person who doubts you. I’m not the person who kicked their partner out _behind their back_.”

*

THEN

Mark sees Eduardo arrive but he’s trying to get the satellite phone network to behave properly; he doesn’t have time to stop now. He can just pretend that Wardo’s not here. He’s used to that.

Then his laptop is being picked up and, holy shit, smashed and Wardo is yelling and the world all comes rushing back in like a tidal wave. Mark hates it when he gets pushed back into reality like this, it’s like being jerked right out of a dream.

“I can’t believe you,” Eduardo is saying. “I cannot believe you locked me out of the facebook. And worse, you didn’t even have the balls to tell me first. I could have been in the field with no way to contact anyone, Mark, did you not even _care_?”

Mark feels pinned to his chair and anger rushes into him, hot and vicious.

“No members of the Phoenix are allowed access to the facebook,” he snaps.

Eduardo stops shouting. He just stops all together, and that’s no less frightening.

“You had _no right_. I’m a co-founder of the F, I’m a part of that system, Mark, it’s _ours_.”

“Really?” Sean says. He’s leaning on the desk next to Mark, looking quite at home. He’s almost definitely doing that on purpose. “I don’t see any of your code on the site.”

Eduardo swings round to face Sean, expression darkening. “My _name_ is there.”

“You might want to check that again,” Sean tell him. Sean must have gone through with the contact box changes, then. Mark hadn’t looked. He told himself he didn’t have time.

“Mark,” Eduardo says, and it rings out across the now silent room like a judgement. “Are you? Is this your way of throwing me out? For the account thing, I told you why I did that- ”

“Don’t blame me for not trusting you,” Mark spits out. “You were willing to compromise your own crew. All for the sake of a _club_.” Eduardo lies for pleasure and gambles for fun. Mark can’t risk the F for that, for someone who won’t even leave the city for him. For the site.

Eduardo is wearing his black suit, ready to go steal something. Here in the light and glass he looks completely out of place. “Tell me this isn’t because I got in and you didn’t.” he says, stepping forward. “Tell me that you didn’t _screw me over_ because of some ridiculous grudge. I knew you never got over that.”

Mark opens his mouth to protest but he doesn’t know where to _start_. The conversation is like rope going through his hands, falling away from him too fast to control.

Sean - fuck, Mark had forgotten Sean was even here - says, “Did you really think you could just swan around in your suits, trading on your name -”

“Sorry!” Wardo yells at him, and Mark usually scoffs when he does this, explodes into declamatory rage, but he can’t find the breath, even. “We can’t all be fuck-you-world hackers, you pretentious douchebag. Some of us want to look like professionals.”

“Well then, it’s a good thing you’ve got the Phoenix to go to,” Mark says.

Eduardo rounds on him again, and the way he looks at Mark is _painful_. Mark had planned this so carefully, thought he was ready, prepared for everything except how Wardo is so angry with him Mark wants to _hurt him back_ , except how Wardo looks destroyed, and it makes another part of Mark want to defend him and there’s too much going on in his head. Mark takes the fastest option and glares back.

“You know what, why shouldn’t I leave, seeing as you don’t even _trust_ me,” Wardo says.

“You can’t leave something that you aren’t even a part of any more,” Mark challenges. He knew this would happen in the end. Wardo never committed to the F. Not really. Mark doesn’t even know who he is any more, let alone trust him.

Sean snorts and Mark knows, he knows that this is it, that Wardo is over the edge and there’s nothing he can do, no way to grab on and pull him back, even if he wanted to.

“Fine then,” Wardo says. He leans down so that he’s closer to Mark, eyes huge and dark and unknowable. “You’d better be prepared to find someone who so damn good that they make up for all the shit you pull, because I _am_ , asshole.”

“Fine,” Mark flings back. “It’ll be easy enough to start giving your share to Sean.”

Eduardo spins round to leave, and Mark feels breathless like he’s run a mile flat out.

“Wardo,” Sean calls. He steps up to Eduardo, who looks _murderous_. “I’ll need your security token,” Sean adds. Eduardo pulls out of the punch at the last second, leaving Sean cringing away.

“Don’t try me, Parker. I’ve taken down good men for worse reasons.” He looks Sean up and down, back straight, like he’s the prince of some far off land and Sean is a mere peasant. Weighed and found _wanting_. “I like standing next to you, Sean. It makes me look like a good person,” Eduardo says, and stalks out, the perfect exit.

*

NOW

“I said I was sorry about that,” Mark reminds him.

Eduardo stops in his tracks. “No, actually, you haven’t,” he says.

Marilyn says, “Come _on_ , Dustin,” pulling at his arm.

“I could probably take you out,” Dustin says conversationally, standing his ground.

Marilyn shrugs. “Possibly. But I have information that could take you down.”

The part of Mark’s brain that isn’t gaping at Eduardo - because Mark definitely remembers apologising - registers the incongruity of this picture; Dustin in jeans and a threadbare tee shirt, Marilyn in heels, not a hair or seam out of place, standing there discussing how they could physically or intellectually ruin each other.

“Okay, okay, fine,” Dustin says, narrowing his eyes at her. “Next time, Delpy...” She grins at him and drags him out of the room.

Mark waits until he hears the door shut. “Wardo,” he tries. “I really, definitely said sorry. I am out of adjectives for how sure I am.”

Eduardo says, “And I’m pretty sure that I would remember that . So when did this _alleged_ apology take place?”

“You’ve been spending too much time with Marilyn,” Mark grumbles.

“When?” Eduardo presses and Mark wants to say, _no, you were conscious at the time,_ but shakes it off.

“Eduardo,” he says. “I said I was sorry on the phone. I sort of assumed you would remember seeing as you agreed to come back because of that.”

Eduardo breathes out heavily, and sits down on the edge of the table, legs stretched out in from on him in a long line. “That was... ‘Sorry, I guess’ was your apology for _screwing me over_ for Sean fucking Parker?”

“It wasn’t for Sean,” Mark interrupts. “Wardo, what the fuck?”

“Whatever,” Eduardo dismisses. “That’s not the point right now.”

Mark says, “But you agreed to come back. I thought... You just came even though I hadn’t said anything about... Everything.” He wishes he could find some way to sum it all up, but everything he thinks of sounds unusually melodramatic and he is _not_ calling it a break up, however much Dustin tries to make him. And it’s the story of him and Wardo and the F and the facebook. It sort of _is_ everything.

Eduardo sighs, a long, trailing breath that might just be sad. Mark can’t be sure but there’s something in the hunch of his shoulders, the downward sweep of his lashes. Something like defeat. It’s familiar.

“I thought you were apologising for being a dick at the meeting. When Chris had specifically told you not to be,” Eduardo explains.

“Actually he told me not to be an asshole,” Mark says. “But yeah. No. I’m sort of sorry about that but not really because fuck nice, but you’re making me get away from the point-”

“I am _not_ making you get away from the point, you’re getting yourself away from the point.”

“Well _now_ you’re getting me away from the point,” Mark says.

Eduardo looks up, anger bright in his eyes, and it feels a little like victory because Eduardo’s not broken and he’s not flat, he’s lit up all for Mark. Fine, Mark’s ready for a fight.

And then Wardo looks right at Mark for the first day in days and he just laughs, all out, gasping for breath and shaking his head. “The hell, Mark. We are _fighting about fighting_ ,” he says.

Mark says, “We once had an argument about bagel toppings, Eduardo,” because they did, Chris on his side and Dustin on Wardo’s, and it had gone on for about an hour and then there was a sort of mutual decision to get very drunk instead. “We always knew what the other person meant, really.”

Eduardo huffs out a laugh. “Yeah, we did. That was our thing. And now our thing seems to be misunderstanding each other, willfully or otherwise.” He’s swinging his legs back and forth under the table because he can’t sit still for more than five minutes, can’t move unless it’s grand sweeping gestures. Mark can back this up with almost infinite examples.

“I always thought I knew you better than I knew any other person,” Mark confesses. “It was nice.”

“People usually want to know someone better than other people know them,” Eduardo says. “But. Oh. Okay.” He looks up at Mark. “But you didn’t?”

“I didn’t,” Mark confirms. Admitting that shouldn’t have been harder than admitting that he’d hurt them beyond repair. But it is the worst of it, that Mark could have got Eduardo and himself so very, very wrong. Mark had always been so utterly sure about both of those things.

Eduardo looks down at his hands, because when he’s not on a job Wardo is an open book if he’s looking at you. “I might have got some things wrong too.”

Mark really wants to say, “No shit.” He thinks Chris might know somehow and actually stab Mark in the ear with a pen like he threatens to do on a daily basis. Chris makes really specific threats. They’re very effective.

He settles for, “I think so.”

Eduardo smiles, soft and so very pleased, the kind of smile that sneaks in under Mark’s defences. Why would he react like that when Mark has said that he was wrong? It’s _exasperating_.

Eduardo says, “We never did this, did we? Never said what we thought was actually going on.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’m back in LitCrit and the professor is asking, ‘what was their motivation’,” Mark says.

Eduardo grins. “You first,” he says.

“Oh fuck off,” Mark says.

Eduardo says, “Just because you’re bitter that you didn’t think to call shotgun on the Not Going First. Now, shoot.”

“I did what I thought was right and I’m not... You couldn’t stay part of the F at the time. That part is fine. That part is business. But I’ve realised some things lately and I... I wanted to hurt you for not believing in us. The facebook.” He looks at Wardo again. Rip off the bandaid. Right. “Me.”

“I sort of always suspected that you treated the facebook like a kid does an imaginary friend,” Eduardo muses. “You know. The facebook doesn’t like this story, the facebook wants to eat dessert before dinner, the facebook is scared.”

Mark raises his eyebrows and Edaurdo makes a ‘sorry, sorry’ face at him. Mark says, “I had this amazing thing and everyone was relying on me to make this work, make this happen and keep us safe and _you weren’t there_. It felt like...”

There’s no way he can finish that sentence.

*

THEN

“How can you not have worked this out before?” Dustin asks over breakfast. Mark and Chris are nursing hangovers like nothing Mark has ever experienced before. Fucking juddering liquor.

“I just stopped thinking about him,” Mark says with a shrug. He’s always had too many thoughts on the go at once, a hundred trains of thought all vying for his attention, and he’s learnt to shut the unimportant ones down. He’s really good at it. His mom has had some talks - well, Talks - with him about compartmentalisation, which he’s pretty sure she’s given Chris Cliff Notes on. Or there’s more of alarming similarity between them than Mark had previously thought.

Dustin says, “Oh, right, because it’s that easy.” He looks over at Mark, tilts his head. He looks worried, Mark thinks, but he’s tried to hide that he is.

“I didn’t want to think about him, Dustin, so I stopped.” Maybe it hadn’t been _quite_ that easy. “So, that’s why I haven’t thought it through. I haven’t thought it _at all_.

Well, Mark can learn a trick or two from Dustin. “There’s that scene in Indiana Jones when they prise back that heavy stone and underneath there’s this writhing mass of snakes and you can’t tell what they are or where one ends and the other begins...”

“Mark,” Dustin says. “Are you comparing your feelings about our Eduardo to _snakes_?” He sounds kind of horrified.

“Yes?” Mark says. It’s a great movie reference, he thought Dustin would appreciate it. “So you put the stone back over the snakes and you just leave them alone and don’t think about the kind of snake that they might be.”

Chris says, “Maybe when you tell Wardo-”

“If,” Mark corrects. It seems unlikely, frankly.

“When,” Chris says, “you tell him, maybe don’t use the snake reference.”

*

NOW

Mark ends up going for, “Like something I didn’t want to think about,” and it feels like a fumble, a dropped bracket.

Eduardo half-smiles. “No witticisms to offer?”

“It was messed up. You were my best friend, we were a team. You were supposed to be there. But you said no, Wardo. You never said no before.”

Eduardo gives him a horrified look. Mark sort of wishes he’d gone with the snake thing. He bites back a thousand cut downs he wants to throw into the waiting silence.

“Do you...” Eduardo starts, and then just shakes his head. “Do you actually hear yourself, Mark? I said no to you _once_ and you decided to get rid of me? Talk about throwing your toys out of the pram, fuck.”

“I _know_ ,” Mark says. “But I really didn’t think you’d even care, that you even cared. I thought it was proof that you’d chosen them over us. One foot out of the door already.” _The facebook was scared_ , he thinks, yeah, Wardo was right about that one, too. “You clearly didn’t care about the facebook because you gave over the information, gave them accounts. And if you didn’t care about the facebook, why should you want to stay in the F. You clearly didn’t want to be with us.” He keeps saying ‘clearly’, remembers thinking it over and over, as if adding that word made it fact. _Clearly_ , obviously, you don’t have to look at the evidence if it’s _self-evident_.

“Mark, I was terrified that you didn’t want me,” Eduardo says and then just freezes. “I mean...”

Something twists in Mark’s stomach, because it sounds like a different kind of confession with Eduardo looking at him like that, caught out. But then that’s been their problem for too long, Mark putting his own bias on the things that Eduardo says, ignoring everything else but what Mark wants to be. He says, “You mean what?”

Eduardo bites his lip. “I’m sorry, I just can’t get over how... The facebook was never my priority. You all were. Being a part of whatever you were a part of... You had Sean to replace me. I wanted to remind you that I...” Eduardo isn’t like this, usually. He always has an easy swing to his sentences, a smile and a comeback. Mark liked throwing him off his rhythm when the worst Eduardo would do was stutter to a stop and then start up again with a scathing attack on Mark’s social skills, or perhaps punch Mark in the arm. Not this, when Eduardo looks like he’s crashed into something, eyes hollow. “That I mattered. That you couldn’t leave me behind.”

The twist becomes a sharper, uglier thing. Eduardo’s expression is too close hallways and too bright offices familiar, and they did this, they broke each other, but Mark did most of all. Always first and best, that’s the Mark Zuckerburg way.

“I’m so sorry,” Mark says without even thinking about it, and even that comes out shattered. “I thought you were conning us, which really wasn’t so implausible when you look at the evidence...” He registers Eduardo’s expression. “But that isn’t important. I was jealous.” Wardo can think it only went one way, that he was jealous of Eduardo for getting into somewhere Mark was rejected from, and it’s not like that’s untrue. But he was also jealous of them, for being the ones who got Eduardo. It was kind of an all out shitstorm of jealousy. “And I was angry and I don’t know what I wanted but it wasn’t this.”

“Me neither. You know that, right?” Eduardo says. “I was just so _angry_.”

“That’s sort of an understatement,” Mark says. He wants to say _stay_.

Eduardo stands up from the table and smiles like he knows. “I think I was right to be, though. And I think you were too. It was a mess.” He tilts his head, stares at Mark. “Do you ever feel like twenty was just implausibly young to be doing _anything_?”

“At the time, I would have punched you for saying that,” Mark says.

“But...” Eduardo says, nodding. He already knows that Mark agrees.

“Yeah.”

It only seems like that when he looks at pictures or thinks about the others, looking in from the outside but god, they were _so young_ it makes something ache inside of him. People always talk about the difference between sixteen and eighteen, eighteen and twenty one, but some days the gulf between nineteen and twenty five seems unbridgeable, like those two people aren’t connected at all.

But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. “I wanted to _win_. I don’t any more,” he says. It doesn’t matter who shot first - although Mark knows Eduardo’s opinion on that argument too and there they are agreed - and it doesn’t matter how deep the bullet went.

And Eduardo, who walks into rooms full of strangers with a smile, who’s always been the brave one, says, “I thought what happened then was the worst thing that could ever happen to me and maybe it was but. Being right and being angry, it wasn’t worth it.”

“Time and fucking distance,” Mark says.

Eduardo makes a face. “And alcohol and bad karaoke.” He shakes his head at Mark. “You don’t want to know.”

Mark sighs. “I want to say that we just needed to grow up some, but I can feel my younger self rolling his eyes. I’m pretty sure I teased Erica about this exact point, actually, but there’s nothing more irritating than a cliché that applies perfectly to your life. The universe seems to be taking delight in exacting a very specific kind of revenge for every one of my less than graceful moments, although that doesn’t mean I’m going to start talking like a motivational poster.”

Wardo tries to hide a chuckle in his hand. “You would make the worst motivational posters ever. But, yes, no, I mean... Yes. We did. We had to stop being those people before we could have this conversation about them.”

Mark says, “Ah, our younger, more foolish selves.” He smiles at Eduardo, who smiles back and maybe it really can be this simple. It’s really unfortunate how often Chris gets to use his And Now I am Vindicated face.

“So we won’t be stupid any more,” Eduardo says.

Mark raises his eyebrows. “I wasn’t stupid. There were errors.” Eduardo looks like he’s about to start yelling or laughing or, Mark doesn’t even know any more, Eduardo never does what Mark expects these days. He adds, quickly, “Errors that I’m really sorry about now. Really. It won’t happen again.” He means it. He’s going to make this work. Even if he has to has these horrifying conversations once a day. Well. Week. Maybe.

“We’ve applied a bugfix and we can be Mark and Eduardo 2.0,” Eduardo says with a grin almost cheesy enough to go with that statement.

“That’s. Wow. That’s horrible,” Mark tells him. His shoulders loosen up.

“True. But you’re worse,” Eduardo asserts. He sighs theatrically. “After I came up with a geeky metaphor just for you...”

“Does this mean that I have to come up with some weird weather pun to apologise?” Mark asks because Eduardo is just as bad as he is and while it was admittedly kind of cool of Wardo it was also _incredibly lame_. Mark is just now remembering that when it comes to Wardo Mark is not only capable of having feelings but of having many conflicting ones at the same time.

“You said you were sorry. I said I was sorry. Done. I’m forgiven and you know you are, too?” Eduardo asks, tipping into questioning right at the last. Mark had known that, had seen it in the smile and the duck of Eduardo’s head, in the way he said “nostalgia” and “Mark”, so it doesn’t make sense that he feels better, lighter, for hearing him say it out loud.

Mark says, “And now we can. What? Start again?”

“Hi,” Eduardo says, and holds out his hand, because he’s _like that_.

Mark rolls his eyes and shakes his head so that Eduardo knows just how ridiculous Mark is finding him right now but he says, “Yes, fine, hi.” And he puts his hand in Eduardo’s.

Eduardo just sort of stares at him for a second, says, “Oh my god. Mark. _Hi_ ,” pulls Mark into a hug.

Mark stumbles into him and kind of bashes his nose on Eduardo’s collarbone or some stupid hard part of his too-skinny body, but it doesn’t really matter because Eduardo hasn’t been this close in years. Eduardo mutters, “I missed you, asshole.”

Mark made a promise to himself about honesty, and it’s cards on the table time, all in - well, not _all_ because there’s ripping off a bandaid and then there’s stabbing yourself in the gut - so he admits, “Yeah. You too.”

It’s okay, Mark’s face is hidden in Eduardo’s shoulder, no one can see his face, and only Eduardo can hear him.

They’ve always fit together freakishly well, Mark used to think that every time Wardo hugged him. And he had done that a lot, so much that Mark probably wouldn’t have registered it if not for that one part of his brain that always, always noticed how Mark’s head went just right into the curve of Wardo’s shoulder and neck.

He’d spent a lot of time wondering if there was a word for that part of the body. Mark _wasn’t_ stupid at nineteen, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that he hadn’t been putting his intelligence to the best use at certain junctures. Eduardo based neck-shoulder junctures.

He closes his eyes and thinks, _please_. He doesn’t know what he’s asking for.

Something chirrups from his pocket and Eduardo steps back, hand trailing down Mark’s arm as he pulls away.

Mark gets out his cell, grins at the message. “Dustin wants to know if it’s okay to come back in yet. And if he needs to bring the first aid kit.”

Eduardo’s grin close up is, yeah, really something. “I should have known that the mouse droid message tone would be Dustin,” he says.

“I can’t believe you recognise that, you dork,” Mark teases. He expects Wardo to say “Takes one to know one,” or call him a hypocrite, which he does, but not before a crease appears between his eyes. It’s too quickly smoothed away, too small, too be called a frown but it’s something, a tiny tell that Eduardo has forgotten that Mark has always known that about him, and never meant it as an insult.

*

THEN

“And peanuts and cotton,” Eduardo says, before CJ can finish the principle crops of Burkina Faso. He’s not really watching the TV, instead he’s reading a book in the window seat, limbs everywhere like usual.

Mark doesn’t remember when Eduardo stopped acting like an overly officious butler in their suite, tidying, smiling from the periphery. It seemed to be one step from that to acting like the place was his, no middle ground, going straight from invisible to invader.

Mark likes it better like this; Eduardo in his socks, looking totally at home.

“And you know this because...” Chris asks.

“It’s got one of the world’s lowest GDPs,” Eduardo says, although he would probably call it an explanation.

“Oh dude, come on,” Dustin says. “Seriously?”

Eduardo shrugs. “Dustin, you can identify video games by their menu music. Like, a bar in.” He goes back to his book.

“Bunch of dorks,” Chris says fondly, and Dustin leans over to high five Mark and then Eduardo, who shakes his head but does it anyway, smile not quite hidden behind the pages.

*

NOW

Boston is pretty much as Mark remembers - centuries-old brickwork and decades-ugly concrete, all named for faraway places and long dead war heroes.

Also it’s fucking cold for April.

Eduardo laughs when Mark shivers, says, “Born to be a Californian, clearly.”

Chris shakes his head at both of them. “Mark, you’re from New York, suck it up. Eduardo, I distinctly remember you nearly dying in about four layers of sweater when we came back here, so don’t you even start.”

It’s another piece of information that Mark didn’t have before, one that he can slot into the blank space that is Eduardo after he walked out of one office and into another five years later.

They drive out to Cambridge, past the Porcelli headquarters a couple of times, Chris taking them some ridiculous route that he claims makes them less trackable but Mark knows what he’s doing. It’s not really a feasible plan though, because Mark doesn’t need to see the Square or Kirkland or anything that obvious to start the onslaught of memories. It’s _Harvard_ and Chris and Eduardo are arguing in the front about street crossing laws in Massachusetts, and the sweep of the river and the curve of the bridge are still the same, the exact same as when Mark thought this was the only thing he’d ever want, just to be here, and when he looked back and thought, “Well, I’ll probably not come here again,” ceding the East Coast to Eduardo like the spoils of some great war.

_So even with Chris trying his best to avoid campus, Mark will still be hit with the memory of tripping down the library steps in his flip-flops, waiting outside Elliot for Eduardo, getting drunkenly lost with Dustin in his first week and stumbling across a building with huge exotic animals carved into the stone around the top of it. They had found it completely hilarious and enthralling and had sat naming all the animals for what turned out to be an hour, just going round and round, repeating themselves, with Dustin insisting that one of them was a gnu. It’s sad and wonderful all at once._

_“Oh, sure, just run them down, that’ll help us keep a low profile,” Eduardo says. “I’m sure no-one will notice the blood splatter on the front of the car, no, not at all.”_

_Chris keeps looking straight ahead. “Not that you’re prone to hyperbole or anything.”_

_They’re here because finding the Winklevii has been tricky, but finding the Porcellian club is easier than easy. Sometimes Mark can’t believe these dinosaurs still exist, with their headquarters and their rules and their, ugh, their everything._

_After they have printed out the blueprints in some divey internet cafe - because no, Wardo, I did not think to bring an A3 printer with me, what the fuck, and you’re the one who needs to see everything spread out like this - Chris hires them a tiny office suite somewhere downtown. He’s taken to looking at his cans of coke like he wishes they were something stronger, and calling Dustin to bitch about how much nicer it was when “Mark and Wardo were still scared enough to play nice.”_

_It’s sort of horrible, and the kitchenette thing has some really suspicious stains, but there are desks and tables and Mark can rig up a network that is capable of running more than one thing at once. He actually makes happy noises when he checks the bandwidth but luckily there’s no one there to hear._

_One of the desks collapses under a box but it’s no big deal. There were no electronics involved._

_Eduardo traces lines of sight from the security cameras with his finger and makes a considering noise._

_“Plan?” Mark asks, dragging his chair closer to Wardo._

_“Maybe. There’s always something they overlook, you see.” He grins at Mark, the one that means, hey, this one is for you. “Who guards the gatekeeper?”_

_He traces a suspiciously perfect looking circle around something in the main entrance. “Do you think you could crack the receptionist’s computer?”_

_Marks pulls a face because that sounds like fieldwork but, “Yes, obviously. They usually only have the standard windows password lock. _You_ could probably crack it.”_

Eduardo says,“I object to the “any fool” implication you put into that. And I’m assuming it’s -” he mock glares at Chris, “ - just hyperbole.”

“Probably,” Mark says. “And if there was anything more complex I’d have to be there. Plus we don’t want to actually leave any kind of trace, and I’m the only one who can actually... Fuck.” He’s just talked himself into fieldwork.

Eduardo smirks.

“Now we just have to work out a schedule for recon,” Chris says brightly, and Eduardo’s face falls.

He says, “I’m... Is there any way I can not do that?”

Chris and Mark exchange a look. “Does someone not want to get be in the van?” Chris asks, in his best Talking To Small Disagreeable Children voice. Mark has heard the lot.

Eduardo shrugs, says, “Not really. And I’m not very good at it, let’s be honest.”

“Well, no,” Mark says, smiling so that Eduardo knows that he doesn’t mind. That’s not something Wardo would ever have said, before, not with this loose, easy air. Mark likes it. If anyone could stand to learn to be a bit selfish, it’s Eduardo. “You get bored.”

*

THEN

“What is he doing, Dustin, give me the binoculars.” Mark makes a grab for them but Dustin catches his arm, twists until it hurts.

Dustin says, “No way, this is too awesome.”

Chris takes the binoculars from his other hand, takes a look and doubles over laughing while he holds them out to Mark.

Eduardo is still in the car, which is something. He’s nodding along and, oh, god, _mouthing along_ to something.

“At least that explains why he’s not answering his cell,” Mark says, unable to look away.

“Please give me the binoculars back,” Dustin begs. “The bopping. Mark, please, I will pay you actual money. ”

“Do we know what he’s listening to?” Chris asks, as Mark ignores Dustin in favour of watching Eduardo drum on the steering wheel.

Dustin says, “Pick a radio station, any radio station, you know what he’s like. What are you thinking?”

Chris leans to look out of the window. Eduardo is supposed to be keeping an eye on the side entrance from their cheap rental car, but there’ve been people staring a bit too hard at it, so they’re bringing him back in. Or they would be if Wardo would just answer his fucking cell.

Chris says, “If we can work out what radio frequency he’s listening to, we can highjack it. Unless you fancy cycling through all of them.”

Dustin sighs, digs a tiny radio out of his backpack. He’s the one who’s been in this room longest, the other shift, and he always brings supplies.

They hop from station to station, Mark still training the binoculars on Wardo’s happy, unaware face, clearly singing along to something that he loves.

He knows the instant they hit the song, can match the words to the shape of Eduardo's mouth, to the rhythm of his head and the silly uncomplicated joy of it.

*

NOW

“Their system really shouldn’t be that hard to crack,” Mark grumbles as he scrambles in through the window that Eduardo’s jimmied open. It’s been a hard climb up a rope, preceded by a hard swim across the river, all in the pitch black. Mark really hates fieldwork.

Eduardo makes a shushing gesture. Mark throws his hands up and has to hope that this translates his exasperation to Eduardo. Of course Dustin couldn’t come, too busy with his ‘recon’ out West. Mark knows what Dustin looks like when he’s going to get laid in the near future, that’s all he’s saying.

The Porcellian headquarters is all old wood panelling and black and white photographs. Mark scowls at them for good measure. The front desk is right at the front of the room, lit by moonlight - more like light pollution, probably- coming in through the large glass doors, the main entrance to the building. Mark spots the receptionist’s computer. He sits down on the floor behind the desk, and Eduardo stands with his back to him, keeping watch. Mark leans back against Eduardo’s legs unthinkingly.

He unplugs the monitor from the tower and replaces it with his own, much smaller, dimmer screen before booting up the system. As he’d predicted, there is only one layer of security to get onto the secretary’s profile, and he breaks the password after a couple of minutes. He tables his rant about entropy for later.

“Mark,” Eduardo whispers, and Mark types as fast as he can, pulling up email and calenders. There’s only one reason why Eduardo would risk talking right now.

Sure enough, about thirty seconds later Eduardo ducks down behind the desk, back to back with Mark, and Mark hears the footsteps. He gives up sorting and just dumps as much as he can onto the flash drive.

“Go,” he says.

Eduardo moves forward, shoving the wheeled chair so that it flies across the floor. Mark turns back just in time to see it hit a guard who doubles over, dropping his gun.

Mark sees Eduardo look back around the room, sizing up options and possibilities in a flash. Then Eduardo leaps forward and pushes, and the guy goes backwards and out of the window. He’ll go into the river below, which is smart, no body or blood or physical evidence. Eduardo stands looking out, back to Mark.

Mark doesn’t know what to do.

*

THEN

“I don’t know what Dustin’s talking about,” Mark says, well, half shouts over the noise of the bar. It’s dark and crowded which makes it a good place for two pseudo leaders of two criminal outfits to meet up but it also makes it pretty hard to carry out a normal conversation. Or what Mark considers a normal conversation these days.

“He’s basically been an assassin for hire since he was 15. I don’t know why he’s getting so weird about it now.”

“You can’t understand,” Erica says. She has the same expression that Dustin has, like she’s sorry for him and relieved all at once.

Mark says, “Look, just because I haven’t pulled the trigger doesn’t mean...”

“Oh, you’ve ended lives with keystrokes, got your revenge from dark rooms miles away because that’s what the criminal elite do these days, but it’s not the same thing, it doesn’t...” Erica shakes her head. “If you’ve never looked someone in the eye and known you’re about to end their life, you can’t. You know that they say that people’s eyes are like windows to the soul? Well, you can tell the instant that they die, because they stop being windows and start being mirrors.” She drops her gaze for a second, tears another strip off the label of her beer bottle. “There’s nothing behind them any more.”

Mark shivers involuntarily. Erica sets her jaw. “So, no, Mark, you don’t understand, and you never will.”

*

NOW

Mark looks at Eduardo, in that second, and what flashes through his brain is, _I’d kill someone just to understand you_. Which is a truly fucked up thing to think, and an even more fucked up way to realise that you’re in love with someone.

Mark has known what it’s like to have people you’d kill for. It’s kind of inevitable, living the life he does. He thought that about all of the F _years_ ago. But this is new. Any second now Eduardo is going to turn around and Mark wants to know, more than almost anything he’s ever wanted, what he’s going to look like. What he’s thinking. What Mark needs to do for him.

Maybe he’ll never be able to figure out exactly how he felt about Eduardo all those years ago, try as he might to reverse engineer base feelings from the end product. But he knows now, with horrible, perfect certainty, that right now, this Mark loves this Eduardo, for the person he was then and is now and everything in between.

“Something’s not right,” Eduardo says, still facing the window.

Mark picks up the gun from the floor, fast, checks the room for anything else of theirs. “Do we?”

“Yes,” Eduardo says and turns and grabs Mark’s arm in one fluid movement. “Emergency exit strategy.”

Mark thinks that one through and then swears to himself. He really hates leaving through the vents. There’s never as much room in them as the movies make out.

“Could be worse,” Eduardo says cheerfully. He doesn’t sound even slightly out of breath, which is unfair considering just how fast he’s running, dragging Mark along with him.

*

THEN

“This was not the life of glamour that I was lead to believe high stakes crime would be,” Mark complains, as they trudge through the sewage. This is why Mark hates coming out into the field. Everything always goes wrong whenever he does.

Dustin swings the flashlight so that Mark can see his disbelieving face. “Well, we would be in a very different situation if _someone_ hadn’t decided to get facetious and correct the CEO on his math.”

“He was wrong,” Mark points out.

Dustin says, “True, but as a server you a) probably shouldn’t have been able to do that sum in your head and b) really shouldn’t have called him intellectually incapable. I’m just saying...”

Mark rolls his eyes in the darkness.

“Stop it,” Dustin calls back.

There is a scraping noise above them and a circle of daylight appears. They clamber up the ladder to meet a very amused looking Eduardo.

“All those in favour of Mark not being part of the field team _ever again_ , raise your hand,” Dustin says.

Everyone raises their hand.

*

NOW

“I think you guys were right,” Chris says. He turns the screen so that they can all see. The security camera footage is grainy but they can still see lights going on all over the building that Mark and Wardo have just exited.

“The guard must have set off an alarm,” Mark says.

He looks over at Wardo. He can’t seem to stop. “Thank you,” he says. Eduardo smiles back, shrugs, and Mark is going to do something ridiculous if Wardo keeps that up. Eduardo makes everything so mixed up, like Mark is lighter than he’s ever been, and in far too deep, an emotional whiplash-creating person that Mark is - _Christ_ \- stupidly in love with.

Marilyn frowns down at the schematics on the table. “If there was an alarm switch in that room, it was a recent addition,” she says.

Chris types something into the IRC box, and then says, “Andrew says that’s the most up to date version he can find, but that the Porc do tend to...” He waits, watching the lines of text pop up. “Go ‘off page’? Is that a... Never mind. He says that it’s not his fault. Fucker.”

Mark tosses him the flash drive and Chris catches it one-handedly, because that’s Chris Hughes for you.

“What have we got here,” Chris murmurs to himself.

Mark watches Wardo watch Chris read, and there’s no-one there to call it creepy, so that’s fine.

“They’ve got a meeting in the calender for a week from now, for a Messers W. This is everything we need.”

“No one ever thinks about the receptionists,” Eduardo says with a sigh. “But they hold the keys to the kingdom.”

Chris looks up from the screen. “Someone better call Dustin and tell him to get on the next flight. Some one who is not me,” he adds quickly.

*

THEN

The Stanford aren’t like a Boston club. They don’t have territory, don’t much care that Mark and his gang have moved in just down the road.

“We know we’re good enough not to be threatened by you,” their leader says with a sharp grin. She and Sean apparently go way back, and they have this spiky chemistry that Mark isn’t sure what to make of.

Later on he realises that Sean is kind of scared of her. Not that he blames him, Amy Ritter is a force to be reckoned with.

So he doesn’t understand why Dustin gets away with calling her Amelia, a name that she declared a dislike for the second time they all went out for dinner. But he does, dragging out the “e” with big eyes that Amy seems to be trying and failing not to find charming.

But then he and Chris are talking - Mark refuses to call it gossiping - and Chris says, “You know, he never calls her baby or darling or, you know, any of the things he calls the rest of us after one beer.”

“He just calls her Amelia,” Mark realises.

*

NOW

Dustin arrives the same day as a huge box of tech from Andrew, and he and Wardo tear into it like small children.

“Oo, tasers,” Dustin says. Wardo takes something complicated out of the box, many pieces of metal and black plastic. He glances down at what Mark assumes is a schematic and then starts to put in together, fingers fast and sure.

Mark swallows, shuts his eyes for just a second, and the images fade behind his eyelids.

“Andrew send anything for me?” he shouts across the room.

Wardo and Dustin look up with matching grins, trigger happy and rifle bright.

Eduardo says, “You get the van, Mark, isn’t that enough? It has that horrifying monitor wall.”

“There’s nothing horrifying about it,” Mark says, with the certainty of someone who spends too much time squinting at text on a screen.

Getting into the Porcelli in the daytime is a whole different affair, with numbered stages and back up plans and synchronising of watches.

The Winklevii are, of course, meeting their contact in one of the room on the top floor, so they have to make it past guards in the close confines of the hallways.

Mark, thankfully, is going to be in their new van, he’s already got a good chair in there. He’s earned the money to spend on proper back support. Mark is _owning_ adulthood.

Chris is the public face of the operation, the smiling, confused out of towner face. It’s an old con combined with a little something new. The umbrella blocks the view of the camera, sir, but I can’t get it down, Boston is pretty windy, huh?

The umbrella has software in the handle, but the security guard at the front desk won’t notice that when he takes it away from Chris.

“Give me the thrill of a good, clean break-in any time,” Dustin says and Eduardo nods.

*

THEN

Dustin doesn’t talk to Mark for a week. It’s not exaggeration, not close. Dustin sits across the way, codes furiously and doesn’t say one single word to Mark. A small, distant part of Mark sort of admires the constant force of will it must be taking.

He tries to explain, once, that he had to get rid of Eduardo for _them_ but Dustin just gives Mark a look and turns away.

Eduardo is gone, back to New York and then Harvard, and Chris has always been going back to school.

It’s just Mark and Dustin and occasionally Sean, who drops by less after Dustin takes to getting out a different kind of weaponry and displaying it on his desk every time Sean is around. The job they pulled, the last one before Wardo arrived, the one that Eduardo thought he was coming out for, keeps them going.

They don’t plan anything else, just code in choking silence.

“You could just leave,” Mark says one day.

Dustin looks up from his monitor. “No, Mark, I can’t. Even if I wanted to.”

“Dustin I...” Mark starts but he doesn’t know what he is, what he wants. The code is fine, but Mark can’t... He likes the way Dustin used to smile at him when they were sharing jokes on IRC, and the way that he always knew how Mark wanted to end his sentences. He liked hearing about the improbable things he’d done, the stupid challenges he and Wardo would set each other.

“I know he was your best friend, Mark - which by the way makes the whole thing worse - but he was...” Dustin stops and swallows hard and for one awful moment Mark thinks that he might cry. “But he was one of the few people I had who I could actually _talk to_ , you know? And he was generally awesome. And now I’m going to be forever associated with betrayal and backstabbing and other bullshit beginning with b.”

It had seemed like such a clean, simple solution to the F’s problems, but instead it’s messy, unexpected sharp edges everywhere like smashed glass.

Mark says, “I hope that you can be friends, again, Dustin.” It seems like the best outcome he can hope for, the most he can repair.

It takes a long while for Dustin to smile at Mark again, but the silence is over, at least.

*

NOW

The van always feels like a school bus on the first day back when they are heading to a job. Dustin and Eduardo are all in black, just casual enough to be unremarkable if you passed them in the street, at least not when they aren’t side by side.

Dustin is going to infiltrate the back stairs and Wardo’s taking the fire escape and they have some sort of race to the middle thing going on that Mark isn’t even touching.

Mark adjusts his monitors again. Chris peers back over the driver’s seat, says, “Okay, I have 11.45, everyone?”

“Always with the watches,” Mark mutters. He doesn’t watch Eduardo leave the van, but tracks him with the cameras until he disappears. Eduardo is still very good at vanishing.

“I’m in!” Dustin crows down his comm. “You should have seen the size of this guy-”

“We do not have time for one of your play-by-plays, Moscovitz,” Mark hears Chris say.

Dustin laugh is still bell clear, despite the interference. “Why Christopher, you were the one who told me to check in at least once every five minutes.”

“Why on earth would you do that?” Wardo says.

“Museum job. You go off grid for a few-”

“Twenty minutes, Dustin”

*

THEN

“What the hell were you doing?” Chris yells, once Dustin turns back on his comm. Mark can see his hand shake at the controls. It’s their first job without Eduardo and everyone is on edge. Not helped by Dustin’s twenty minutes of dead air.

“There was a cute docent -”

“Dustin Moscovitz, if you turned off your comm to _flirt_ -”

“It wasn’t like that. She was doing this really awesome impression of a sabre tooth tiger,” Dustin says, slightly dreamily.

Chris laughs disbelievingly, relief sharpening it into something almost desperate. “Oh, that’s _fine_ then.”

*

NOW

Mark doesn’t care that much about being in the van. The lighting isn’t great but he’s got his laptop, his monitors, his systems. He’s coded in plenty worse places. He sweeps through the channels again, still nothing.

Then he realises that he hasn’t heard from anyone in a while.

“You know we were only kidding about the play by plays, Dustin,” he says into his comm.

Silence.

“Chris? Wardo? Dustin?” He cycles through all of the frequencies over and over, but all he ever gets is the ragged shush of his own breath being fed back to him.

Shit.

There’s nothing coming up on the cameras, nothing untoward, as far as he can see. Then he has a flash of inspiration, turns on the radio. Nothing. They must have employed some sort of jammer. Which suggests that one of the parties involved know that they’re here.

One of his alerts flashes and he turns up the channel monitering the Porc’s internal security radios. “Attention.” That’s a Winklevoss voice, Mark would know their douchey vowels anywhere. “We have one of the members of the F. Send extra guards to the second floor.”

Mark doesn’t think, just grabs his gun and gets out of the van. There’s no guard on the back staircase -thank you Dustin- and Mark takes them two at a time.

He’s picking the lock of the door to the second floor when his comm start to hum. Mark presses the button and Chris is saying, “Hello? Mark? Hello?”

“Chris,” Mark says, so relieved he can hardly speak. He keeps a tight grip of the lockpick. “Are you okay? They’ve, they’ve got someone, do you know-”

Chris says, “Mark,” urgently. “I had eyes on Dustin, I don’t know what...”

The door swings open.

“Mark!” Chris says again. Mark slips the comm piece into his pocket and steps over the threshold.

One of the Winklevii is standing in the middle, Mark doesn’t know which one and it’s not important, because the only thing that counts is the way he’s got Wardo, twisting his arm behind his back. It’s the only thing Mark can see, like he’s jump focused on it, Wardo’s unflinching gaze filling the whole frame.

“Clever,” Mark says. “Making us think you had one of us so that we’d all jump to rescue them.”

“Revealing yourselves and letting yourself get captured in the process,” the other Winklevoss says, coming over to stand by his brother.

Wardo looks over and says, “Mark, you idiot.”

Eduardo’s hair is hanging down into his eyes but his back is straight and his eyes defiant. Mark can’t look away from him. He feels like he did all those years ago, like the world has snatched away the glorious possibility he could see, just out of reach.

“You’re not really in any position to talk,” Mark says. Of course it was Eduardo who did something brave and completely stupid when he thought one of them had been captured.

*

THEN

Wardo probably doesn’t think Mark remembers, that they were both too stoned for anything to have stuck. But Mark can’t forget the way his face had closed up, resolute. He’’s lucky that one of the men involved was brought up on furthers charges in America about five years ago. They’d brought some stuff up from the Saverin case, filed it electronically.

There’s just one picture of Eduardo in the police files Mark hacks into. Wardo’s only ten years old, looks younger. They’ve gone with the standard ‘hold up today’s newspaper’ and Mark can see Wardo’s fingers gripping the edge of it too hard.

The fear is huge and terrible in his eyes.

Wardo hadn’t mentioned being scared, when Mark had asked why his family had moved from Brazil. He’d just talked about waiting, waiting for someone to come rescue him.

*

NOW

Mark takes a very deep breath. “What do you want, Tyler? You’ve _got_ the facebook.”

Tyler grins. “Not actually the point, here.”

“You... don’t want the facebook?” Mark says. “Because that makes stealing it kind of a waste of time and energy, don’t you think?” He wants to reach for his gun but he can’t break eye contact with Eduardo.

Tyler says, “Well, everyone knows we took it from you. That’s almost worth it by itself.”

“The code we got is useful, but it’s not the most important thing,” someone else says. Oh, of course.

“Hi, Divya,” Mark says. Divya nods at him from where he’s leaning on a table at the edge of the room. “Mark.” He levels his own gun at Mark about the same time as Mark aims for Tyler.

“Ah, you’re the Porcelli contact they’re meeting. Still after my network, Narendra?” And then it clicks. “Oh. You _are_.

“The thing about VPN keys, for the less tech savvy gentlemen over there, is that they can be extremely hard to crack. And the facebook network, well, it’s the most secure, most far reaching in the world. So many countries...”

“And you thought, what would tempt Mark Zuckerberg out into the open, where you can take his key,” Mark realises.

Divya says, “The facebook, obviously. But then, no, even going after your beloved site, you were still too careful for us.I wanted to catch one of you in the Porcelli’s the other night, but you got out somehow.”

“But we’ve got you this time, two for the price of one,” Cameron says. He smiles at Mark, cruel mouth and perfect teeth.

Mark says, “What are you going to do, shoot him unless I give you the key?”

Cameron makes a face. “No, Mark. That wouldn’t be... We aren’t common murderers, we are _gentlemen_.”

_“So give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just shoot the lot of you,” Mark says. He’s always been too common for the Porcelli, so fuck them. “Right now.”_

_“We thought you might say that, so we took out a little insurance. The new security at the Porcelli is _great_ , don’t you think?” Divya says. He walks over to where there’s a laptop, open on a table. _

He clicks a couple of times and a security feed starts. Mark watches Eduardo - small and black and white but unmistakable - launch himself at the guard and knock him out of the window.

“You did a great job, but you missed one of the new cameras. We don’t have to do anything more than hand him in. Murder One for Mr Saverin,” Divya says, smug.

Mark feels like he might throw up. Wardo has gone pale.

Wardo or facebook. Well. At least it’s not a new problem.

“So that’s why you should hand over your key. I know you keep it on you. That’s the problem with becoming a legend in your own lifetime, Mark, people know things about you.”

Mark reaches up to where he keeps his key, attached to a lanyard that he hasn’t taken off in _years_. “Let Eduardo go. He walks over to me. I’m going to put my key down on the floor and if any of you even _move_ I will shoot it. It won’t survive that.”

Wardo looks probably the most shocked of them all, but it’s possibly just because he has the best eyes for it.

“What?” Divya says.

Mark makes an impatient noise. “I will put the key on the floor and move away from it, so that’s my end. You let Eduardo go. Stage One. This is not complicated.”

“I don’t think he thought you would give it up that easily,” Wardo says. He looks like he put up a pretty good fight before Tyler got him on his knees.

Mark lifts the key off from round his neck. “ _He_ was wrong then, wasn’t he,” he tells Wardo, unable to stop himself even now.

“And what’s stage two?” Cameron asks. He’s always been the smarter one. It’s all relative, but still.

“You send me the file, and I’ll know if you’ve copied it, trust me, and I’ll send you the passcode that goes with that key,” Mark explains. It’s not the best plan he’s ever come up with, probably not even top ten, but this will be the plan that gets their hands off Wardo.

The Winklevii look over at Divya, who nods.

Tyler lets go of Eduardo’s arm and steps away from him quickly. Eduardo stands, winces, and Mark sort of regrets not shooting anyone. Wardo edges over to Mark and takes his spare gun from its place in his belt, tucked in the small of his back. Eduardo was the one who taught him that.

“Come on,” he says, and they back out of the room, side by side until they get to the door. They don’t even hesitate, turn and run as soon as they’re out of a line of sight, the line of fire.

Mark reaches for his comm when they reach the bottom.

“Chris,” he snarls into it. He won’t be able to rebuild facebook without control of the network, won’t be able to do much for a while without the code. And now the van has gone.

“Mark, listen, I heard, and I need you and Wardo to get as far away from the Porcellian as you can,” Chris says calmly. “Are you clear of the building?”

“Yes, but - ” Mark says, not even sure where to _start_.

“Good. We had to take the van. Get to the bridge, Marilyn will meet you there. Just, trust me, _go_.”

_Mark turns to tell Wardo to go, to stop heading for the alley where the van was but Eduardo is staring at him. He looks stricken. “We have to get to the bridge on foot,” Mark says._

_“You just gave it up,” Wardo says, almost too quiet to be heard._

_Mark stares back._

_Then the windows above them explode._

_“Run,” Mark tells Eduardo._

_They’re half way down Mount Auburn street when a car pulls up beside them and Mark has his gun half raised before he sees Marilyn in the driver’s seat._

_“Come on, fast car, pretty girl, it’s the perfect end to the show,” she says as they climb in._

_“What the fuck was that?” Wardo asks, shielding his eyes with a practised air as he shakes the glass out of his hair._

_Marilyn smiles and accelerates. “That would be Chris. And the failsafe that he assures me you knew was in the key.”_

_Mark feels sort of struck dumb. Chris had said there was a failsafe but he’d assimed it was... Well. He had _not_ assumed that that meant there were _explosives in it_ , fucking _hell_. He’s been wearing that every day for years._

Mark looks at Eduardo’s face in the rear view mirror, can’t quite trust himself to turn around.

“Wardo,” he starts, but Eduardo just shakes his head.

“Can you drop us off at the headquarters, please,” he says to Marilyn. She laughs low in her throat.

“It’s five dollars extra for breaking awkward silences, sir,” she says, and Mark doesn’t know if it’s that they attract these kinds of people or if being in the F eventually gets to your brain and makes you say those kinds of things.

Eduardo says, “Do you have change for a twenty?” and doesn’t say anything else until they get back. Mark tries to get Chris on his comm a couple of times but nothing doing.

The Porcelli are going to be _pissed_ but Mark doesn’t care. He got Wardo out, and even if Wardo is goes back to Singapore and doesn’t say another word to Mark that will have been a victory. And the facebook. The facebook won’t be anyone else’s but Mark’s.

He turns to Marilyn when she stops the car but she stops him by raising her hand. “Go sort it out,” she says. “Again, Chris would like me to reiterate to you, and I would like to officially second, _try not to be an asshole_.”

Edaurdo is already inside, checking the alarms and the security feeds. “It looks like we’re still good here. Safe,” he says.

There’s a bruise already forming on the edge of his cheekbone. Eduardo is whip thin, all the places to break far too obvious. Mark says, “You’re so stupid sometimes, Wardo, you make me want to tie you to something solid so that you can never do anything that stupid again.”

Wardo crosses both of his - ridiculously narrow, seriously - wrists and raises his eyebrows at Mark. “Thanks?” he says.

“I didn’t know, Wardo. I didn’t know what Chris was going to do,” Mark says, and Eduardo just stares.

“Wow, so it really was kind of a winning gamble for them,” Wardo says easily, but something in his jaw clenches.

“Maybe not so much of a gamble. Even without that I would have chosen you,” Mark says without thinking.

Wardo frowns.

Mark says, “Really, Wardo? Like I could have done anything else. I...” He stops, looks at Eduardo, at his confused, hopeful face, the way his fingers move as he twists his hands. It’s hopeless. “Do we have to do this here, now? You’re wearing that fucking suit.”

Wardo looks down at himself. “And?” he asks.

“You can’t be so stupid as to... It makes you look stupidly hot, Wardo, seriously, I get that you can’t see just what it does to your ass but the rest of it you can definitely see. But it’s also what you were wearing on the... When you left. And so the combination of lust and guilt is really not helping me make sense.”

“Oh.” Eduardo bites his lip. “Guilt?”

“You would ask about the guilt,” Mark says with a sigh. It’s more the lust he’s dealing with now. Apparently his brain is determined to be confused when it comes to Eduardo Saverin, because Mark can’t decide if he wants to shove Wardo into a wall and go down on him right there, desperate with it, or if he wants to lay him out on a bed and lick every inch of skin he reveals, slow, so slow and sweet. Even wanting isn’t simple, because Mark wants _everything_.

“Mark,” Wardo says sharply. Focus, Zuckerberg.

“I can’t believe you thought I wouldn’t,” Mark says. Make Eduardo talk. That seems like a good plan.

Wardo pulls a face. “It’s not like there isn’t precedent.”

“Exactly, Wardo, we said we weren’t going to be stupid any more. Right? I wasn’t going to make the same, wrong choice _twice_. That’s practically the definition of stupidity. I’m not going to do that to you again. To _me_ again. There can be another facebook. It turns out I had one... You’re my only...”

Eduardo says, “Do I need to save you from this sentence?” He is looking at Mark like he’s made some sort of great discovery, like Mark is the best odds, the biggest score, and Mark knows exactly what to say.

“Like I said, they weren’t so much gambling. When it comes to you, I’m playing with loaded dice,” Mark admits.

“Did you just explain your feelings for me using a very apt metaphor?” Eduardo says.

Mark smiles. “I’ve been friends with Chris for a long time. He was bound to corrupt me at some point.”

Wardo swallows again and Mark knows the expression on his face. It’s his “Once more into the breach” look. It means Wardo is about to say something he knows is going to get him into trouble.

"I’m a conman, you know that. I like the world to see me a certain way. But with you... I may not always be the _best_ me, with you.." Wardo' smile turns rueful. "But I'm always the truest."

“You just had to upstage me, didn’t you,” Mark says, gaze caught on the way Wardo’ black shirt has a button missing at the top, just where it should cover up the tan skin of his neck. He watches the muscles shift as Wardo swallows. This is so ridiculous. His mouth feels dry.

Wardo laughs, a low, rich half-chuckle. “You like it really.”

“I do,” Mark admits, in love and helplessly honest with it.

Wardo says, “I just. I want you to know that it was real. All of it.” His face has that soft, open look on it again, and Mark has reached a hand out to his cheek before he knows what he’s doing. A smile blossoms across Wardo’ face, Mark feels it under his palm.

“Good,” Mark says, it’s not that he was worried but Mark has never trusted easily. He steps close, slides his hand to the back of Eduardo’s neck. “You’re going to stay?”

“Yes,” Wardo says, and then adds, in this defiant, desperate tone, “Also I’m in love with you.”

“Me too,” Mark says, and the truth is so, so easy. “Sort of stupidly so.”

Wardo wraps his hand around Mark’s other wrist. “That explains the tying me to things comment, I guess,” he says.

Mark just has time to register the fact that he’s being pulled closer before Eduardo leans in and brushes up and along Mark’s cheek with his nose, shiver soft, until their mouths are aligned, only a breath away from each other. “Mark,” he says, the word crowded with things that Mark can’t untangle but he knows the sense of, and it’s so like Wardo to go from teasing to sentimental in a gesture.

“I _know_ ,” Mark says, and kisses him while Wardo’s mouth is still the shape of his name.

And, oh, look, they don’t just fit together in one way, Mark mouth goes perfectly with Eduardo’s mouth, onto the soft skin of Eduardo’s neck, and his thumb fits just right into the hollow of his hipbone. Exactly, like he’d moulded Wardo and left an indentation there.

“Mark,” Wardo says, urgently, but Mark is caught up in this, the rush of finding all the ways Eduardo is _his_.

He hears Wardo mutter, “Fuck it,” and then he’s being pushed backwards so that the backs of his legs hit the desk. Eduardo crowds him until Mark is forced to sit on the desk with Eduardo standing between his legs.

“That was still a pretty stupid thing you did back there,” Wardo says. He sighs, small and soft, and brushes a stray curl behind Mark’s ear. Mark only rolls his eyes very briefly, because, yeah, it’s Wardo and Mark is never going to be able to stop him doing stuff like that. Mark will strain something if he rolls his eyes every time.

“Not stupid. Haven’t you heard?” Mark says, “I’m crazy about you.”

Eduardo says, “Not sure that’s better,” but he kisses Mark anyway, so Mark will take that as a victory. Eduardo kisses hard, pushing into Mark’s mouth like he thinks he has to force his way in, like Mark isn’t his too, any way Wardo wants. Mark tries to tell him, sweeps his tongue slower, tangles his hand in the back of Eduardo’s shirt - resting it in the dip at the base of his spine, opens his legs wider to pull him closer. He makes his body an invitation, all the things he ever wanted Wardo to hear; _come out, come back, stay, please, just stay_. Wardo makes a really incredible noise, an addictive noise, oh god, Mark is never going to be able to do anything else.

He gasps into the kiss, gets enough breath and space to say, “We are going to have _so much sex_ ,” because it’s all he can think right now, writ large across his brain in letter of fiery, so, much, so very much sex.

Eduardo’s hand tightens in Mark’s hair. And then he goes for Mark’s belt.

Mark can’t quite believe what he’s about to do. “No,” he says, despite his much, much better judgement. “Wardo, I wanted - ”

“Well, Mark Zuckerberg, I don’t care. I’ve been planning this on and off pretty much since I was nineteen, okay? It was going to be perfect. There was going to be a bed and music and _none of that matters now_ because you couldn’t not talk for one minute. So I don’t care what you wanted, because you can’t expect to say things like that and not have me... Yeah. So. Shut up, Mark.”

Mark doesn’t want to set a particular kind of precedent here, either, but then Wardo is dropping to his knees. Holy fuck. “I’m not sure that that me or the desk are going to hold out, Wardo.”

Eduardo looks up at Mark from under his lashes, eyes huge, mouth smiling and bitten-red. “ _Mark_ ,” he says.

Mark shuts up.

*

THEN

Mark sees Eduardo in a set of recon stills. Marilyn passed them to him, and she wouldn’t know. Eduardo’s not the focus of the picture at all, at the edge and mostly hidden, but Mark spots him right away.It’s nothing much, just three quarters of his face and half of his shoulders, one of a group of businessmen at some function.

He looks so, well, adult. Chris used to freak on the regular about how _thin_ Eduardo was. But this Eduardo is wearing a suit - that’s not unusual at least - and wearing it well. His hair is swept away from his face and he’s smiling.

It’s not a smile that Mark knows.

He’s confused about why Eduardo would even be there, if he even knows any of the people who are watching him talk.

But this is Eduardo-in-Singapore and Mark doesn’t know that person. That person is a stranger, and Mark will just have to accept that.

He puts the photo down, and doesn’t let his hand brush Eduardo’s profile. That’s done with, now.

*

NOW

Mark’s comm starts to crackle somewhere in the happy, messy, making out part, the good part where it’s endorphins for everyone and no one has had time to get cold or uncomfortable. Which is either really good timing or really poor. Mark takes it out of his pocket and turns it back to receive.

“Chris is making me call because he’s worried that it’s going to be like the end of a James Bond movie and he’s going to be Q accidentally interrupting you having sex.”

“Does that make me a Bond girl?” Eduardo asks.

“Wardo!” Dustin yells. Mark holds the comm away from them. There’s a pause and then Dustin says, “I think, and Chris agrees, that you are totally Mr Bond, Wardo, never fear.”

“Hey,” Mark objects, but his voice is still all sex-doped up. This could become a problem.

“What we really wanted to know was if we had to sleep in the van, or if we could come back to the HQ.”

Wardo says, “Um,” and Dustin says, “Chris! Get out the sleeping bags,” and then, louder, “I don’t mind too much. Chris doesn’t snore or do that horrible jaw grinding thing like Mark.”

“Oh, you can make him stop that, didn’t you know?” Eduardo says. He reaches up to Mark’s face. “You just have to stroke the bridge of his nose for a while. Works like a charm.” He runs the back of one finger right down Mark’s nose.

This is the person Mark loves. This person, who knows that about him, this stupid thing that no one else has ever known before. Eduardo loves in grand gestures and drama, but also in a hundred thousand tiny ways that only Mark will ever recognise.

Dustin is making terrible noises down the comm and Wardo seems to come to. “Oh shut up, Dustin,” he says, and turns off the comm.

“He’s going to bitch that you hung up on him for _all of time_ ,” Mark says.

Wardo shrugs, says, “He’d be worse if he had to hear us make out.”

“We’re making out again?” Mark asks.

“Do you have somewhere else you’d rather be?” Wardo says, pressing back in close. The desk groans underneath them.

It’s less than perfect, less than planned and uncertain as hell. Mark smiles and kisses him and says, “No, no, never.”

 

(And then they quietly take over the world.)

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to comment here or over on its [LJ post](http://laliandra.livejournal.com/39962.html)
> 
> Plus check out the AWESOME [art by hapakitsune](http://hapakitsune.livejournal.com/242359.html)
> 
> And! An [AMAZING mix by novembersmith](http://www.mediafire.com/?l5w7q5vi8auaufd)


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